progressive era presidents essay

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The Progressive Presidents

Roosevelt’s Square Deal

At the dawn of the twentieth century, America was at a crossroads. Presented with abundant opportunity, but also hindered by significant internal and external problems, the country was seeking leaders who could provide a new direction. The political climate was ripe for reform, and the stage was set for the era of the Progressive Presidents, beginning with Republican Theodore Roosevelt.

Teddy Roosevelt was widely popular due to his status as a hero of the Spanish-American War and his belief in “speaking softly and carrying a big stick.” Taking over the presidency in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley, he quickly assured America that he would not take any drastic measures. He then demanded a “Square Deal” that would address his primary concerns for the era—the three C’s: control of corporations, consumer protection, and conservation.

The ownership of corporations and the relationship between owners and laborers, as well as government’s role in the relationship, were the contentious topics of the period. Workers were demanding greater rights and protection, while corporations expected labor to remain cheap and plentiful. This conflict came to a head in 1902, with the anthracite coal strike in Pennsylvania. Coal mining was dirty and dangerous work, and 140,000 miners went on strike and demanded a 20 percent pay increase and a reduction in the workday from ten to nine hours. The mine owners were unsympathetic and refused to negotiate with labor representatives. With the approach of winter the dwindling coal supply began to cause concern throughout the nation.

Roosevelt, going against established precedent, decided to step in. He summoned the mine owners and union representatives to meet with him in Washington. Roosevelt was partly moved by strong public support and took the side of the miners. Still, the mine owners were reluctant to negotiate until Roosevelt, threatening to use his “big stick,” declared that he would seize the mines and operate them with federal troops. Owners reluctantly agreed to arbitration, where the striking workers received a 10 percent pay increase and a nine-hour working day. This was the first time a president sided with unions in a labor dispute, and it helped cement Roosevelt’s reputation as a friend of the common people and gave his administration the nickname “The Square Deal.”

Emboldened by this success and in pursuit of the first element of his Square Deal, Roosevelt began to attack large, monopolistic corporations. Some trusts were effective and legitimate, but many of these companies engaged in corrupt and preferential business practices. In 1902, the Northern Securities Company, owned by J.P. Morgan and James J. Hill, controlled most of the railroads in the northwestern United States and intended to create a total monopoly. Roosevelt initiated legal proceedings against Northern Securities and eventually the Supreme Court ordered that the company be dissolved. Roosevelt’s radical actions angered big business and earned him the reputation of a “trust buster,” despite the fact that his successors Taft and Wilson actually dissolved more trusts.

In 1903, with urging from Roosevelt, Congress created the Department of Commerce and Labor (DOCL). This cabinet-level department was designed to monitor corporations and ensure that they engaged in fair business practices. The Bureau of Corporations was created under the DOCL to benefit consumers by monitoring interstate commerce, helping dissolve monopolies, and promoting fair competition between companies. In 1913, the DOCL was split into two separate entities, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Labor, both of which continue to play an important role in regulating business today.

The railroad business continued to be one of the most powerful and influential industries. Like many companies of the time, railroad companies engaged in corrupt business practices such as rebating and price fixing. Roosevelt encouraged Congress to take action to address these abuses, and in 1903 they passed the Elkins Act, which levied heavy fines on companies that engaged in illegal rebating. In 1906, they passed the Hepburn Act, which greatly strengthened the Interstate Commerce Commission. This law allowed the Commission to set maximum rates, inspect a company’s books, and investigate railroads, sleeping car companies, oil pipelines, and other transportation firms. This was a bold action by Roosevelt and Congress given the transportation industry was a powerful lobbyist and a significant political contributor.

The second element of Roosevelt’s Square Deal was consumer protection. In the early 1900s, there was little regulation of the food or drugs that were available to the public. In 1906, Upton Sinclair published a book called The Jungle that described in graphic detail the Chicago slaughterhouse industry. Sinclair intended for his book to expose the plight of immigrant workers and possibly bring readers to the Socialist movement, but people were instead shocked and sickened by the practices of the meat industry.

Roosevelt had the power to do something about the horrors described in The Jungle . He immediately appointed a special investigating committee to look into food handling practices in Chicago. Their report confirmed much of what Sinclair had written. Roosevelt was shocked by the report and predicted that it could have a devastating effect on American meat exports. He agreed to keep it quiet on the condition that Congress would take action to address the issues.

After much pressure from Roosevelt, Congress reluctantly agreed to pass the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Many members of Congress were reluctant to pass these laws, as the meat industry was a powerful lobbying force. However, the passage of this legislation helped prevent the adulteration and mislabeling of food, alcohol, and drugs. It was an important first step toward ensuring that Americans were buying safe and healthy products. Eventually, the meatpacking industry welcomed these reforms, as they found that a government seal of approval would help increase their export revenues.

The final element of Roosevelt’s Square Deal was conservation. Roosevelt was widely known as a sportsman, hunter, and outdoorsman, and he had a genuine love and respect for nature. However, many Americans of the time viewed the country’s natural resources as limitless. For example, many farmers, ranchers, and timber companies in the west were consuming a huge portion of the available resources at an alarming rate. Their primary obsession was profit, and they had little concern for the damage they were causing. However, there was a small but vocal population who had a great deal of concern for the environment. Fortunately for them and for future Americans, the environmentalists had a friend in Teddy Roosevelt.

Environmentalism and conservation were not new ideas, but most had not been concerned with ecological issues. While a number of laws had been passed to prevent or limit the destruction of natural resources, the majority of this legislation was not enforced or lacked the teeth necessary to make a significant difference.

With Roosevelt’s urging, Congress passed the Newlands Act of 1902. This legislation allowed the federal government to sell public lands in the arid, desert western states and devote the proceeds to irrigation projects. Landowners would then repay part of the irrigation costs from the proceeds they received from their newly fertile land, and this money was earmarked for more irrigation projects. Eventually, dozens of dams were created in the desert including the massive Roosevelt Dam on Arizona’s Salt River.

Another major concern of environmentalists was the devastation of the nation’s timberlands. By 1900, only about 25 percent of the huge timber preserves were still standing. Roosevelt set aside 125 million acres of timberlands as federal reserves, over three times the amount preserved by all of his predecessors combined. He also performed similar actions with coal and water reserves, thus guaranteeing the preservation of some natural resources for future generations. Environmentalists such as John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the upstart Sierra Club aided Roosevelt in his efforts. Preserving America’s natural resources and calling attention to the desperate need for conservation may well have been Teddy Roosevelt’s greatest achievement as President, and his most enduring legacy.

Taft’s Administration

In 1908, President Teddy Roosevelt could have easily carried his burgeoning popularity to a sweeping victory in the presidential election, but in 1904 he made an impulsive promise not to seek a second elected term. However, he did not intend to completely relinquish control, so he handpicked a successor. Howard Taft, the 350-pound Secretary of War, was chosen as the Republican candidate for 1908. Taft was a mild progressive and an easygoing man that Roosevelt and other Republican leaders felt they could control. Taft easily defeated the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, and the Socialist candidate, Eugene Debs, in what can be construed as continued public endorsement of Roosevelt.

Unfortunately, from the onset of his administration Taft did not live up to Roosevelt’s standards or the expectations of other Progressives. He lacked Roosevelt’s strength of personality and was more passive in his dealings with Congress. Many politicians were surprised to learn that Taft did not share some of the Progressive ideas and policies that Roosevelt endorsed. In fact, many people felt that Taft lacked the mental and physical stamina necessary to be an effective President.

The first major blow to the Progressives during Taft’s administration was the Payne-Aldrich Tariff of 1909. Taft called a special session of Congress to address what many people felt were excessive tariffs. After this session, the House of Representatives passed a bill that moderately restricted tariffs, but their legislation was severely modified when it reached the Senate. Radical Senators, led by Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, tacked on hundreds of revisions that effectively raised tariffs on almost all products. Taft eventually signed the bill and declared it “the best bill that the Republican Party ever passed.” This action dumbfounded Progressives and marked the beginning of an internal struggle for control of the Republican Party.

Another issue that caused dissension among Republicans was Taft’s handling of conservation issues. Taft was a dedicated conservationist and he devoted extensive resources to the protection of the environment. However, most of his progress was undone by his handling of the Ballinger-Pinchot dispute. Pinchot, the leader of the Department of Forestry and a well-liked ally of Roosevelt, attacked Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger for how he handled public lands.

Ballinger opened up thousands of acres of public lands in Wyoming, Montana, and Alaska for private use, and this angered many Progressives. Pinchot was openly critical of Ballinger, and in 1910 Taft responded by firing Pinchot for insubordination. This infuriated much of the public as well as the legions of political players who were still fiercely loyal to Roosevelt.

A major rift occurred in the Republican Party as a result of Taft’s straying from Progressive policy. The party was split down the middle between the “Old Guard” Republicans who supported Taft and the Progressive Republicans who backed Roosevelt. This division in the Republican Party allowed Democrats to regain control of the House of Representatives in a landslide victory in the congressional elections of 1910.

In early 1912, Roosevelt triumphantly returned and announced himself as a challenger for the Republican presidential nomination. Roosevelt and his followers, embracing “New Nationalism,” began to furiously campaign for the nomination. However, as a result of their late start and Taft’s ability as incumbent to control the convention, they were unable to secure the delegates necessary to win the Republican candidacy. Not one to admit defeat, Roosevelt formed the “Bull Moose” Party and vowed to enter the race as a third-party candidate.

The split in the Republican Party made the Democrats optimistic about regaining the White House for the first time since 1897. They sought a reformist candidate to challenge the Republicans, and decided on Woodrow Wilson, a career academic and the current progressive governor of New Jersey. Wilson’s “New Freedom” platform sought reduced tariffs, banking reform, and stronger antitrust legislation. The Socialists again nominated Eugene V. Debs whose platform sought public ownership of resources and industries. As expected, Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican vote, and Wilson easily won a majority of the electoral votes. Having received only 41 percent of the popular vote, Wilson was a minority president.

Wilson’s New Freedom

Upon taking office, Woodrow Wilson became only the second Democratic president since 1861. Wilson was a trim figure with clean-cut features and pince-nez glasses clipped to the bridge of his nose, giving him an academic look. Partly due to his academic background and limited political experience, Wilson was very much an idealist. He was intelligent and calculating, but the public perception was that he was emotionally cold and distant. Wilson arrived in the White House with a clear agenda and the drive to achieve all of his goals. In addition, the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress was eager to show the public that their support was not misdirected.

Wilson’s platform called for an assault on “the triple wall of privilege,” which consisted of tariffs, banks, and trusts, and rarely has a president set to work so quickly. His first objective was to reduce the prohibitive tariffs that hurt American businesses and consumers. In an unprecedented move, Wilson personally appeared before Congress to call a special session to discuss tariffs in early 1913. Moved and stunned by Wilson’s eloquence and force of character, Congress immediately designed the Underwood Tariff Bill, which significantly reduced import fees.

The Underwood Tariff Bill brought the first significant reduction of duties since before the Civil War. In order to make up for the loss in revenues caused by the lower tariffs, the Underwood Bill introduced a graduated income tax. This new tax was introduced under the authority of the recently ratified Sixteenth Amendment. Initially, the tax was levied on incomes over $3,000, which was significantly higher than the national average. However, by 1917 the revenue from income taxes greatly exceeded receipts from the tariff. This margin has continued to grow exponentially over the years.

After tackling the tariff, Wilson turned his attention to the nation’s banks. The country’s financial structure was woefully outdated, and its inefficiencies had been exposed by the Republican’s economic expansion and the Panic of 1907. The currency system was very inelastic, with most reserves concentrated in New York and a few other large cities. These resources could not be mobilized quickly in the event of a financial crisis in a different area. Wilson considered two proposals: one calling for a third Bank of the United States, the other seeking a decentralized bank under government control.

Siding with public opinion, Wilson called another special session of Congress in June of 1913. He overwhelmingly endorsed the idea of a decentralized bank, and asked Congress to radically change the banking system. Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, which was arguably the greatest piece of legislation between the Civil War and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Act created a Federal Reserve Board, which oversaw a system of 12 regional reserve districts, each with its own central bank. This new system also issued Federal Reserve Notes, paper currency that quickly allowed the government to adjust the flow of money, which are still in use today. The Federal Reserve Act was instrumental in allowing America to meet the financial challenges of World War I and emerge from the war as one of the world’s financial powers.

Emboldened by his successes, President Wilson turned his attention to the trusts. Although legislation designed to address the issue of trusts had existed for many years, they were still very much a problem. Again, Wilson appeared before Congress and delivered an emotional and dramatic address. He asked Congress to create legislation that would finally address trusts and tame the rampant monopolies. After several months of discussion, Congress presented Wilson with the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. This act allowed the government to closely inspect companies engaged in interstate commerce, such as meatpackers and railroads. The Commission investigated unfair trading practices such as false advertising, monopolistic practices, bribery, and misrepresentation.

Following closely behind the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, was the Clayton Act of 1914. It served to strengthen the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 (the first measure passed by the U.S. Congress to prohibit trusts) and redefine the practices that were considered monopolistic and illegal. The Clayton Act provided support for labor unions by exempting labor from antitrust prosecution and legalizing strikes and peaceful picketing, which were not part of the Sherman Act. Renowned American Federation of Labor union leader, Samuel Gompers, declared the Clayton Act the “Magna Carta” of labor. Unfortunately, labor’s triumph was short-lived, as conservative judges continued to curtail union power in controversial decisions.

The era of the Progressive presidents produced a number of notable achievements. Trust-busting forced industrialists and monopolistic corporations to consider public opinion when making business decisions. This benefited the consumer and helped grow the economy. The Progressive presidents also increased consumers’ rights by limiting corporate abuses and trying to ensure the safe labeling of food and drugs. The creation of a federal income tax system lowered tariffs and increased America’s presence as a global trading partner. It also raised additional revenues, some of which were used for beneficial programs such as conservation. The Progressive presidents served to strengthen the office of the president and the public began to expect more from the executive branch. Progressivism as a concept helped challenge traditional thinking about government’s relationship to the people and sparked new ideas that stimulated thought for decades to come.

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Progressive Presidents: Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson

Introduction.

The Progressive Era in American history, spanning roughly from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, was a period of significant social, political, and economic change. During this transformative time, a group of presidents emerged, each leaving an indelible mark on the nation’s history and paving the way for a more progressive America.

In this 3,000-word essay, we will delve into the roles and contributions of three influential leaders of this era: Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson. Each of these leaders brought their unique vision and policies to the forefront, shaping the course of the Progressive movement and the nation as a whole.

Theodore Roosevelt: The Trustbuster

As we explore the Progressive Era, we must first turn our attention to Theodore Roosevelt, a larger-than-life figure who ascended to the presidency in the wake of President William McKinley’s assassination in 1901. Roosevelt’s ascent to the highest office in the land marked a turning point in American politics.

Roosevelt, known for his boundless energy and strong-willed persona, embarked on a mission to confront the immense power held by corporate trusts and monopolies. His approach, often described as “trust-busting,” aimed to break the stranglehold that these monopolistic entities had on various industries.

During his presidency, Roosevelt championed antitrust legislation such as the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Hepburn Act, which aimed to curb the excessive influence of big business and promote fair competition. He was not afraid to take on corporate giants like Standard Oil and Northern Securities, earning him the nickname “Trustbuster-in-Chief.”

However, Roosevelt’s legacy extended beyond trust-busting. He was also a fervent advocate for conservation and environmental protection. Through initiatives like the establishment of national parks and monuments, he laid the groundwork for the modern environmental movement.

As we delve deeper into the Progressive era, we will examine Theodore Roosevelt’s policies, his impact on the Progressive movement, and the enduring legacy he left on the American political landscape.

William Howard Taft: The Era of Dollar Diplomacy

William Howard Taft, who succeeded Theodore Roosevelt as the 27th President of the United States in 1909, faced the formidable task of following in the footsteps of his dynamic predecessor. Taft’s presidency marked a continuation of the Progressive movement, albeit with a distinct emphasis on foreign policy and economic interests.

One of Taft’s notable policies was his approach to foreign affairs, famously known as “Dollar Diplomacy.” This foreign policy doctrine aimed to promote American economic interests abroad by using diplomatic means to support American businesses in foreign markets. In essence, it sought to replace “bullets with dollars” as a means of exerting influence.

Under Dollar Diplomacy, Taft’s administration encouraged American businesses to invest in Latin American and East Asian countries, particularly in industries such as infrastructure, mining, and banking. The idea was to strengthen economic ties with these nations and, in doing so, promote political stability and American influence in regions historically prone to instability.

While Dollar Diplomacy had its proponents who saw it as a pragmatic approach to international relations, it also faced criticism. Some argued that it amounted to economic imperialism , as it often prioritized the interests of American corporations over the sovereignty of foreign nations. Taft’s approach drew controversy and tensions in various parts of the world, including in countries like Nicaragua and China.

Despite the challenges and criticisms, William Howard Taft made significant contributions to the Progressive agenda. His administration continued to enforce antitrust laws, and he advocated for safety regulations in the workplace, a move aimed at protecting the rights and well-being of American workers.

As we delve deeper into Taft’s presidency, we will analyze the complexities of Dollar Diplomacy, the domestic policies of his administration, and his place in the broader context of the Progressive Era.

Woodrow Wilson: The Progressive Reformer

Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, assumed office in 1913 with a vision of reform and a commitment to advancing the principles of the Progressive movement. His presidency marked a distinct phase in the evolution of progressivism, characterized by his “New Freedom” agenda and his transformative impact on domestic and foreign policy.

Wilson’s background as a former governor of New Jersey and a scholar of political science provided him with a unique perspective on governance. He believed in restoring economic competition and fairness, and he sought to break up monopolistic corporations, much like Roosevelt and Taft before him.

The centerpiece of Wilson’s domestic agenda was the implementation of the “New Freedom” platform, which aimed to promote small businesses, reduce the power of big corporations, and enhance individual economic liberty. Key legislative achievements during his presidency included the Federal Reserve Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, which aimed to regulate banks and curb anticompetitive practices, respectively.

Furthermore, Wilson’s commitment to social and labor reforms resulted in the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to monitor business practices and protect consumers. His presidency also saw the introduction of labor reforms, such as the Adamson Act, which established an eight-hour workday for railroad workers.

Woodrow Wilson’s progressive ideals extended to foreign policy as well. He advocated for a foreign policy based on moral principles and self-determination. Although initially reelected in 1916 with the campaign slogan “He Kept Us Out of War” regarding World War I, Wilson eventually led the United States into the conflict, believing it was a war to make the world “safe for democracy.”

As we examine Woodrow Wilson’s presidency in greater detail, we will delve into his domestic and foreign policies, the impact of the New Freedom agenda, and the legacy he left on the Progressive movement and the world stage.

Comparing the Progressive Presidents

As we explore the Progressive Era through the lenses of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, it becomes evident that each of these leaders made significant contributions to the Progressive movement, albeit with distinctive approaches and priorities. Comparing and contrasting their presidencies offers valuable insights into the diversity of progressive ideals and actions during this transformative period.

While all three presidents shared a commitment to addressing the excesses of big business and promoting fairness, they differed in their strategies. Roosevelt, often hailed as the “Trustbuster-in-Chief,” focused on antitrust legislation and conservation, aiming to tame corporate giants and protect natural resources. Taft, on the other hand, introduced the concept of “Dollar Diplomacy,” prioritizing economic interests in foreign policy. Wilson, with his New Freedom agenda, emphasized the importance of individual economic liberty and pushed for comprehensive domestic reforms.

Moreover, their foreign policies diverged significantly. Roosevelt was known for his active involvement in international affairs, exemplified by his mediation efforts in the Russo-Japanese War and his pursuit of a “big stick” diplomacy. Taft, through Dollar Diplomacy, aimed to exert American influence through economic means. Wilson, in contrast, initially focused on neutrality in international conflicts but eventually led the United States into World War I with a vision of promoting global democracy.

Despite these differences, there were also commonalities among the Progressive Presidents. All three recognized the need to address the challenges posed by monopolistic corporations, and each contributed to antitrust legislation in their own way. They shared a commitment to improving the lives of ordinary Americans through labor and social reforms, reflecting the broader ethos of progressivism.

Comparing these presidents allows us to appreciate the multifaceted nature of the Progressive movement and its evolving priorities. It highlights the complexities of leadership during a period of rapid change and the enduring impact of their policies on American society.

Legacy of the Progressive Presidents

The legacies of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson continue to shape American society and politics to this day. Collectively, they left an indelible mark on the Progressive movement and the nation as a whole.

Roosevelt’s legacy is perhaps most evident in the realm of conservation and environmental protection. His establishment of national parks and monuments laid the foundation for modern environmentalism. Additionally, his trust-busting policies paved the way for greater government regulation of business practices, a trend that would persist in the decades to come.

Taft’s legacy is closely tied to the concept of Dollar Diplomacy, which, although controversial, marked a shift in how the United States engaged with the world economically. It set a precedent for American economic involvement abroad, influencing future foreign policy decisions.

Woodrow Wilson’s legacy is notable for the enduring principles of his New Freedom agenda, including the creation of the Federal Reserve System and the protection of consumers through the FTC. His vision of self-determination and global democracy also played a pivotal role in shaping the nation’s role on the international stage.

Furthermore, the Progressive Presidents left a lasting impact on the trajectory of American politics. Their commitment to addressing economic inequality, regulating corporate power, and improving the lives of ordinary citizens set a precedent for future generations of leaders and progressive movements. The foundations they laid in areas such as antitrust legislation, environmental conservation, and labor rights continue to influence policy discussions and reforms in the 21st century.

Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, as the Progressive Presidents of their time, navigated the complexities of a rapidly changing America. Each brought their unique approach to addressing the challenges of the era, leaving behind a legacy that continues to shape the nation’s politics and policies.

Roosevelt’s trust-busting efforts and conservation initiatives, Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy, and Wilson’s New Freedom agenda all played pivotal roles in advancing the ideals of the Progressive movement. While their methods and priorities differed, their collective impact on American society, both domestically and in the realm of foreign affairs, was profound.

As we reflect on the Progressive Era and the contributions of these Presidents, we must recognize that their legacy extends far beyond their time in office. Their commitment to social justice, economic fairness, and the well-being of the American people continue to inspire leaders and movements seeking to build a more equitable and progressive future for the United States.

Their stories remind us of the enduring power of leadership and the potential for positive change in even the most challenging of times. The Progressive Presidents of the early 20th century have left an enduring mark on American history, one that serves as a testament to the enduring spirit of progress and reform.

Class Notes – Theodore Roosevelt – Progressive President

The actions of the muckrakers and a newly active middle class were heard by the then Vice President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. When the President, a very conservative William McKinley was assassinated, Roosevelt became President. Roosevelt was the son of a wealthy old money family. He was involved in government from when he was very young. It was his belief that the wealthy had an obligation to serve. This led him to government service. He became the Assistant Secretary of War, left to form the Rough Riders and took them to Cuba where he fought in the famous battle of San Juan Hill during the taking of Cuba in the Spanish American War .

I. Theodore Roosevelt – Progressive

A. The “ Square Deal ” – Reforms – Increase in Federal Power, ended Laissez Faire. ( Result of Roosevelt’s belief in “Noblesse Oblige.” ) “Let the watchwords of all our people be the old familiar watchwords of honesty, decency, fair-dealing, and commonsense.”… “We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less.””The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.” –New York State Fair, Syracuse September 7, 1903

1. Sherman Anti trust Act (Felt trusts should be judged on actions)

2. Mediated Coal Strike

3. Elkins Act (1903)

-Made it illegal for railroads and shippers to offer rate rebates. Railroad had to set rates. They couldn’t change w/out notice.

4. Hepburn Act (1906)

-Gave ICC the power to set maximum railroad rates.

5. Pure Food and Drug Act – Passed in 1906 and amended in 1911 to include a prohibition on misleading labeling.

6. Meat Inspection Act (1906)

7. Conservation

-Strengthening of Forest Bureau and created National Forest Service. -Creation of much national park land. -Appointment of Gifford Pinchot, professional conservationist to be in charge of national forests.

B. Roosevelt and William Howard Taft

1. Roosevelt did not run for a third term. 2. He was only in his mid fifties. 3. Stayed involved in politics. 4. Became dissatisfied with Taft and ran for a third term with a third party, the Progressive Party, which was later nicknamed the “Bull Moose Party.” Bull Moose Party–Nickname for the Progressive Party of 1912. The bull moose was the emblem for the party, based on Roosevelt’s boasting that he was “as strong as a bull moose.”

C. Election of 1912

1. Roosevelt runs for the Progressive Party a.k.a. The Bull Moose Party. 2. Republicans split and the Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson won

Woodrow Wilson – Progressive President

When Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat won the election of 1912 he received only 42% of the vote. The Progressive candidates; Roosevelt, Taft and Debs totaled 58% of the vote. Clearly America still sought progressive change. Wilson, an educator and the son of a Presbyterian Minister, recognized this and embarked on a program to continue Progressive reform called the “New Freedom.”

I. Woodrow Wilson – The “ New Freedom ” reforms

A. Underwood Tariff of 1913 -First lowering of tariffs since the Civil War -Went against the protectionist lobby

B. Federal Trade Act (1914)

-Set up FTC or Federal Trade Commission to investigate and halt unfair and illegal business practices. The FTC could put a halt to these illegal business practices by issuing what is known as a “cease and desist order.”

C. Clayton Antitrust Act (1914)

-Declared certain businesses illegal (interlocking directorates, trusts, horizontal mergers) -Unions and the Grange were not subject to antitrust laws. This made unions legal! -Strikes, boycotts, picketing and the collection of strike benefit funds ruled legal

C. Creation of Federal Reserve System (1914)

– Federal Reserve Banks in 12 districts would print and coin money as well as set interest rates. In this way the “Fed,” as it was called, could control the money supply and effect the value of currency. The more money in circulation the lower the value and inflation went up. The less money in circulation the greater the value and this would lower inflation.

D. Federal Farm Loan Act set up Farm Loan Banks to support farmers.

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Theodore Roosevelt: Impact and Legacy

Theodore Roosevelt is widely regarded as the first modern President of the United States. The stature and influence that the office has today began to develop with TR. Throughout the second half of the 1800s, Congress had been the most powerful branch of government. And although the presidency began to amass more power during the 1880s, Roosevelt completed the transition to a strong, effective executive. He made the President, rather than the political parties or Congress, the center of American politics.

Roosevelt did this through the force of his personality and through aggressive executive action. He thought that the President had the right to use any and all powers unless they were specifically denied to him. He believed that as President, he had a unique relationship with and responsibility to the people, and therefore wanted to challenge prevailing notions of limited government and individualism; government, he maintained, should serve as an agent of reform for the people.

His presidency endowed the progressive movement with credibility, lending the prestige of the White House to welfare legislation, government regulation, and the conservation movement. The desire to make society more fair and equitable, with economic possibilities for all Americans, lay behind much of Roosevelt's program. The President also changed the government's relationship to big business. Prior to his presidency, the government had generally given the titans of industry carte blanche to accomplish their goals. Roosevelt believed that the government had the right and the responsibility to regulate big business so that its actions did not negatively affect the general public. However, he never fundamentally challenged the status of big business, believing that its existence marked a naturally occurring phase of the country's economic evolution.

Roosevelt also revolutionized foreign affairs, believing that the United States had a global responsibility and that a strong foreign policy served the country's national interest. He became involved in Latin America with little hesitation: he oversaw the Panama Canal negotiations to advocate for U.S. interests and intervened in Venezuela and Santo Domingo to preserve stability in the region. He also worked with Congress to strengthen the U.S. Navy, which he believed would deter potential enemies from targeting the country, and he applied his energies to negotiating peace agreements, working to balance power throughout the world.

Even after he left office, Roosevelt continued to work for his ideals. The Progressive Party's New Nationalism in 1912 launched a drive for protective federal regulation that looked forward to the progressive movements of the 1930s and the 1960s. Indeed, Roosevelt's progressive platform encompassed nearly every progressive ideal later enshrined in the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Fair Deal of Harry S. Truman, the New Frontier of John F. Kennedy, and the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson.

In terms of presidential style, Roosevelt introduced "charisma" into the political equation. He had a strong rapport with the public and he understood how to use the media to shape public opinion. He was the first President whose election was based more on the individual than the political party. When people voted Republican in 1904, they were generally casting their vote for Roosevelt the man instead of for him as the standard-bearer of the Republican Party. The most popular President up to his time, Roosevelt used his enthusiasm to win votes, to shape issues, and to mold opinions. In the process, he changed the executive office forever.

Sidney Milkis

Professor of Politics University of Virginia

More Resources

Theodore roosevelt presidency page, theodore roosevelt essays, life in brief, life before the presidency, campaigns and elections, domestic affairs, foreign affairs, life after the presidency, family life, the american franchise, impact and legacy (current essay).

Brewminate: A Bold Blend of News and Ideas

The Progressive Presidents: Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson

Roosevelt’s Square Deal

Taft’s Administration

Wilson’s New Freedom

Along with these significant accomplishments, the Progressive movement also had a number of notable shortcomings. Due to several contrary schools of thought within the movement, goals were often confusing and contradictory. Although most Progressives had good intentions, their conflicting goals helped detract from the overall objectives of the movement. Despite the numerous successes and lofty goals and ideals of the Progressive movement, the federal government was still too greatly influenced by industry and big business. The Progressive movement was not a complete success, but it did serve to spark new ideas and new ways of thinking about business and government. It created a new school of thought that challenged traditional ideas and allowed several new politicians to break the mold and lead the country in a new direction. This new way of thinking proved vital for the United States as the First World War loomed on the horizon.

Originally published by AP Study Notes , republished with permission for educational, non-commercial purposes.

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Progressives and progressivism in an era of reform.

Maureen A. Flanagan Maureen A. Flanagan Department of Humanities, Illinois Institute of Technology
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.84
Published online: 05 August 2016

The decades from the 1890s into the 1920s produced reform movements in the United States that resulted in significant changes to the country’s social, political, cultural, and economic institutions. The impulse for reform emanated from a pervasive sense that the country’s democratic promise was failing. Political corruption seemed endemic at all levels of government. An unregulated capitalist industrial economy exploited workers and threatened to create a serious class divide, especially as the legal system protected the rights of business over labor. Mass urbanization was shifting the country from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial one characterized by poverty, disease, crime, and cultural clash. Rapid technological advancements brought new, and often frightening, changes into daily life that left many people feeling that they had little control over their lives. Movements for socialism, woman suffrage, and rights for African Americans, immigrants, and workers belied the rhetoric of the United States as a just and equal democratic society for all its members.

Responding to the challenges presented by these problems, and fearful that without substantial change the country might experience class upheaval, groups of Americans proposed undertaking significant reforms. Underlying all proposed reforms was a desire to bring more justice and equality into a society that seemed increasingly to lack these ideals. Yet there was no agreement among these groups about the exact threat that confronted the nation, the means to resolve problems, or how to implement reforms. Despite this lack of agreement, all so-called Progressive reformers were modernizers. They sought to make the country’s democratic promise a reality by confronting its flaws and seeking solutions. All Progressivisms were seeking a via media, a middle way between relying on older ideas of 19th-century liberal capitalism and the more radical proposals to reform society through either social democracy or socialism. Despite differences among Progressives, the types of Progressivisms put forth, and the successes and failures of Progressivism, this reform era raised into national discourse debates over the nature and meaning of democracy, how and for whom a democratic society should work, and what it meant to be a forward-looking society. It also led to the implementation of an activist state.

Progressives
Progressivisms
urbanization
immigration

The reform impulse of the decades from the 1890s into the 1920s did not erupt suddenly in the 1890s. Previous movements, such as the Mugwump faction of the Republican Party and the Knights of Labor, had challenged existing conditions in the 1870s and 1880s. Such earlier movements either tended to focus on the problems of a particular group or were too small to effect much change. The 1890s Populist Party’s concentration on agrarian issues did not easily resonate with the expanding urban population. The Populists lost their separate identity when the Democratic Party absorbed their agenda. The reform proposals of the Progressive era differed from those of these earlier protest movements. Progressives came from all strata of society. Progressivism aimed to implement comprehensive systemic reforms to change the direction of the country.

Political corruption, economic exploitation, mass migration and urbanization, rapid technological advancements, and social unrest challenged the rhetoric of the United States as a just and equal society. Now groups of Americans throughout the country proposed to reform the country’s political, social, cultural, and economic institutions in ways that they believed would address fundamental problems that had produced the inequities of American society.

Progressives did not seek to overturn capitalism. They sought to revitalize a democratic promise of justice and equality and to move the country into a modern Progressive future by eliminating or at least ameliorating capitalism’s worst excesses. They wanted to replace an individualistic, competitive society with a more cooperative, democratic one. They sought to bring a measure of social justice for all people, to eliminate political corruption, and to rebalance the relationship among business, labor, and consumers by introducing economic regulation. 1 Progressives turned to government to achieve these objectives and laid the foundation for an increasingly powerful state.

Social Justice Progressivism

Social justice Progressives wanted an activist state whose first priority was to provide for the common welfare. Jane Addams argued that real democracy must operate from a sense of social morality that would foster the greater good of all rather than protect those with wealth and power. 2 Social justice Progressivism confronted two problems to securing a democracy based on social morality. Several basic premises that currently structured the country had to be rethought, and social justice Progressivism was promoted largely by women who lacked official political power.

Legal Precedent or Social Realism

The existing legal system protected the rights of business and property over labor. 3 From 1893 , when Florence Kelley secured factory legislation mandating the eight-hour workday for women and teenagers and outlawing child labor in Illinois factories, social justice Progressives faced legal obstacles as business contested such legislation. In 1895 , the Supreme Court in Ritchie v. People ruled that such legislation violated the “freedom of contract” provision of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court confined the police power of the state to protecting immediate health and safety, not groups of people in industries. 4 Then, in the 1905 case Lochner v. New York , the Court declared that the state had no interest in regulating the hours of male bakers. To circumvent these rulings, Kelley, Josephine Goldmark, and Louis Brandeis contended that law should address social realities. The Brandeis brief to the Supreme Court in 1908 , in Muller v. Oregon , argued for upholding Oregon’s eight-hour law for women working in laundries because of the debilitating physical effects of such work. When the Court agreed, social justice Progressives hoped this would be the opening wedge to extend new rights to labor. The Muller v. Oregon ruling had a narrow gender basis. It declared that the state had an interest in protecting the reproductive capacities of women. Henceforth, male and female workers would be unequal under the law, limiting women’s economic opportunities across the decades, rather than shifting the legal landscape. Ruling on the basis of women’s reproductive capacities, the Court made women socially inferior to men in law and justified state-sponsored interference in women’s control of their bodies. 5

Role of the State to Protect and Foster

Women organized in voluntary groups worked to identify and attack the problems caused by mass urbanization. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs ( 1890 ) coordinated women’s activities throughout the country. Social justice Progressives lobbied municipal governments to enact new ordinances to ameliorate existing urban conditions of poverty, disease, and inequality. Chicago women secured the nation’s first juvenile court ( 1899 ). 6 Los Angeles women helped inaugurate a public health nursing program and secure pure milk regulations for their city. Women also secured municipal public baths in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities. Organized women in Philadelphia and Dallas were largely responsible for their cities implementing new clean water systems. Women set up pure milk stations to prevent infant diarrhea and organized infant welfare societies. 7

Social justice Progressives sought national legislation to protect consumers from the pernicious effects of industrial production outside of their immediate control. In 1905 , the General Federation of Women’s Clubs initiated a letter-writing campaign to pressure Congress to pass pure food legislation. Standard accounts of the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and pure milk ordinances generally credit male professionals with putting in place such reforms, but female social justice Progressives were instrumental in putting this issue before the country. 8

Social justice Progressives sought a ban on child labor and protections for children’s health and education. They argued that no society could progress if it allowed child labor. In 1912 they persuaded Congress to establish a federal Children’s Bureau to investigate conditions of children throughout the country. Julia Lathrop first headed the bureau, which was thenceforth dominated by women. Nonetheless, when Congress passed the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act ( 1916 ), banning interstate commerce in products made with child labor, a North Carolina man immediately sued, arguing that it deprived him of property in his son’s labor. The Supreme Court ( 1918 ) ruled the law unconstitutional because it violated state powers to regulate conditions of labor. A constitutional amendment banning child labor ( 1922 ) was attacked by manufacturers and conservative organizations protesting that it would give government power over children. Only four states ratified the amendment. 9

Woman suffrage was crucial for social justice Progressives as both a democratic right and because they believed it essential for their agenda. 10 When suffrage left elected officials uncertain about the power of women’s votes in 1921 , Congress passed the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infant Welfare bill, which provided federal funds for maternal and infant health. The American Medical Association opposed the bill as a violation of its expertise. Businessmen and political leaders protested that the federal government should not interfere in health care and objected that it would raise taxes. Congress made Sheppard-Towner a “sunset” act to run for five years, after which it would decide whether to renew it. Congress temporarily extended it but ended the funding in 1929 , even though the country’s infant mortality rate exceeded that of six other industrial countries. The hostility of the male-dominated American Medical Association and the Public Health Service to Sheppard-Towner and to its administration by the Children’s Bureau, along with attacks against the social justice network of women’s organizations as a communist conspiracy to undermine American society, doomed the legislation. 11

New Practices of Democracy

Women established settlement houses, voluntary associations, day nurseries, and community, neighborhood, and social centers as venues in which to practice participatory democracy. These venues intended to bring people together to learn about one another and their needs, to provide assistance for those needing help, and to lobby their governments to provide social goods to people. This was not reform from the bottom; middle-class women almost always led these venues. Most of these efforts were also racially exclusive, but African American women established venues of their own. In Atlanta, Lugenia Hope, who had spent time at Chicago’s Hull House, established the Atlanta Neighborhood Union in 1908 to organize the city’s African American women on a neighborhood basis. Hope urged women to investigate the problems of their neighborhoods and bring their issues to the municipal government. 12

The National Consumers’ League (NCL, 1899 ) practiced participatory democracy on the national level. Arising from earlier working women’s societies and with Florence Kelley at its head, the NCL investigated working conditions and urged women to use their consumer-purchasing power to force manufacturers to institute new standards of production. The NCL assembled and published “white lists” of those manufacturers found to be practicing good employment standards and awarded a “white label” to factories complying with such standards. The NCL’s tactics were voluntary—boycotts were against the law—and they did not convince many manufacturers to change their practices. Even so, such tactics drew more women into the social justice movement, and the NCL’s continuous efforts were rewarded in New Deal legislation. 13

A group of working women and settlement-house residents formed the National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL, 1903 ) and organized local affiliates to work for unionization in female-dominated manufacturing. 14 Middle-class women walked the picket lines with striking garment workers and waitresses in New York and Chicago and helped secure concessions from manufacturers. The NWTUL forced an official investigation into the causes of New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire ( 1911 ), in which almost 150 workers, mainly young women, died. Members of the NWTUL were organizers for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. Despite these participatory venues, much literature on such movements emphasizes male initiatives and fails to appreciate gender differences. The public forums movement promoted by men, such as Charles Sprague Smith and Frederic Howe, was a top-down effort in which prominent speakers addressed pressing issues of the day to teach the “rank and file” how to practice democracy. 15 In Boston, Mary Parker Follett promoted participatory democracy through neighborhood centers organized and run by residents. Chicago women’s organizations fostered neighborhood centers as spaces for residents to gather and discuss neighborhood needs. 16

Suffrage did not provide the political power women had hoped for, but female social justice Progressives occupied key offices in the New Deal administration. They helped write national anti-child labor legislation, minimum wage and maximum hour laws, aid to dependent children, and elements of the Social Security Act. Such legislation at least partially fulfilled the social justice Progressive agenda that activist government provide social goods to protect daily life against the vagaries of the capitalist marketplace.

Political Progressivism

Political Progressivism was a structural-instrumental approach to reform the mechanisms and exercise of politics to break the hold of political parties. Its adherents sought a well-ordered government run by experts to undercut a political patronage system that favored trading votes for services. Political Progressives believed that such reforms would enhance democracy.

Mechanisms and Processes of Electoral Democracy

The Wisconsin Idea promoted by the state’s three-time governor Robert La Follette exemplified the political Progressives’ approach to reform. The plan advocated state-level reforms to electoral procedures. A key proposal of the Wisconsin Idea was to replace the existing party control of all nominations with a popular direct primary. Wisconsin became the first state to require the direct primary. The plan also proposed giving voters the power to initiate legislation, hold referenda on proposed legislation, and recall elected officials. Wisconsin voters adopted these proposals by 1911 , 17 although Oregon was the first state to adopt the initiative and referendum, in 1902 . 18

The political Progressives attacked a patronage politics that filled administrative offices with faithful party supporters, awarded service franchises to private business, and solicited bribes in return for contracts. Political Progressives proposed shifting to merit-based government by experts provided by theoretically nonpartisan appointed commissions or city managers systems that would apply businesslike expertise and fiscal efficiency to government. They proposed replacing city councils elected by districts (wards) with citywide at-large elections, creating strong mayor systems to undercut the machinations of city councils, and reducing the number of elective offices. They also sought new municipal charters and home-rule powers to give cities more control over their governing authority and taxing power. 19

Political Progressives were mainly men organized into new local civic federations, city clubs, municipal reform leagues, and municipal research bureaus and into new national groups such as the National Municipal League. They attended national conferences such as the National Conference on City Planning, discussing topics of concern to political Progressives. The National Municipal League formulated a model charter to reorganize municipal government predicated on home rule and argued that its proposals would provide good tools for democracy. 20

In general, only small cities such as Galveston, Texas, and Des Moines, Iowa, or new cities such as Phoenix, Arizona, where such political Progressives dominated elections, adopted the city-manager and commission governments. 21 Other cities elected reform mayors, such as Tom Johnson of Cleveland, Ohio, who placed the professional experts Frederic Howe and Edward W. Bemis into his administration. 22 Charter reform, home rule, and at-large election movements were more complicated in big cities. They failed in Chicago. 23 Boston switched to at-large elections, but the shift in mechanisms did lessen political party control. A new breed of politicians who appealed to interest group politics gained control rather than rule by experts. 24

Good Government by Experts

Focus on good government reform earned these men the rather pejorative nickname of “goo-goos.” These Progressives argued that only the technological expertise of professional engineers and professional bureaucrats could design rational and economically efficient ordinances for solving urban problems. When corporate interests challenged antipollution ordinances and increased government regulation as causing undue hardship for manufacturers, political Progressives countered with economic answers. Pollution was an economic problem: it caused the city to suffer economic waste and inefficiency, and it cost the city and its taxpayers money. 25 In Pittsburgh, the Mellon Institute Smoke Investigation marshaled scientific expertise to measure soot fall in the city and to calculate how costly smoke pollution might be to the city. 26 The Supreme Court in Northwestern Laundry v. Des Moines ( 1915 ) ruled that there were no valid constitutional objections to state power to regulate pollution. 27

The political Progressives’ cost-benefit approach to regulation clashed with the social justice idea that protecting the public health should decide pollution regulation. The Pittsburgh Ladies Health Protective Association argued that smoke pollution was a general health hazard. 28 The Chicago women’s Anti-Smoke League called smoke pollution a threat to daily life and common welfare, as coal soot fell on food and in homes and was breathed in by children. They demanded immediate strict antismoke ordinances and inspectors to vigorously inspect and enforce the ordinances. The league urged all city residents to monitor pollution in their neighborhoods. 29 The Baltimore Women’s Civic League made smoke abatement a principal target for improving living and working conditions. 30 The cost-benefit argument usually won out over the health-first one.

For political Progressives, good government also meant using professional expertise to plan city growth and reorder the urban built environment. They abandoned an earlier City Beautiful movement that focused on cultural and aesthetic beautification in favor of systematic planning by architects, engineers, and city planners to secure the economic development desired by business. 31 Daniel Burnham’s Chicago Plan ( 1909 ) was the work of a committee of men selected by the city’s Commercial Club. 32 Experts crafted new master plans to guarantee urban functionality and profitability through “creative destruction,” to build new transportation and communication networks, erect new grand civic buildings and spaces, and zone the city’s functions into distinct sectors. They proposed new street configurations to facilitate the movement of goods and people. 33 As the profession of urban planning developed, cities sought out planners such as Harland Bartholomew to formulate new master plans. 34

New York’s Mary Simkhovitch contested this approach and urged planning on the neighborhood level, with professionals consulting with the people. She stressed that no plan was good if it emphasized only economy. Simkhovitch and Florence Kelley organized the first National Conference on City Planning ( 1909 ) around the theme of planning for social needs. Simkhovitch was the only woman to address the gathering. All the male speakers emphasized planning for economic development. As architects, lawyers, and engineers, and new professional planners such as John Nolen and George Ford dominated the planning conferences, Simkhovitch and Kelley withdrew. 35

The democratic reform theories of Frederic Howe and Mary Parker Follett reflected competing ideas about political Progressivism and urban reform. Howe believed that democracy was a political mechanism that, if properly ordered and led by experts, would restore the city to the people. The key to achieving good government and democracy was municipal home rule. Once freed from state interference, his theoretical city republic would decide in the best interests of its residents, making city life orderly and thereby more democratic. 36 For Follett, democracy was embedded in social relations, and the city was the hope of democracy because it could be organized on the neighborhood level. There people would apply democracy collectively and create an orderly society. 37 Throughout the country, municipal political reform was driven primarily by groups of men. Women and their ideas were consistently pushed to the margins of political Progressivism. 38

Social Science Expertise

Social science expertise gave political Progressives a theoretical foundation for cautious proposals to create a more activist state. University of Wisconsin political economist Richard Ely; his former student John R. Commons; political scientist Charles McCarthy, who authored the Wisconsin Idea; and University of Michigan political economist Henry C. Adams, among others, filled the role of social science expert. Social scientists founded new disciplinary organizations, such as the American Economics Association. This association organized the American Association of Labor Legislation (AALL). Commons, University of Chicago sociology professor Charles R. Henderson, and Commons’ student John B. Andrews were prominent members. The AALL focused on workers’ health, compensation, and insurance, in contrast to the NCL emphasis on investigation and working conditions. 39 Frederic Howe, with a PhD in history and political science from Johns Hopkins, became a foremost theorist for municipal reform based on his social science theories. John Dewey promulgated new theories of democracy and education. Professional social scientists composed a tight circle of men who created a space between academia and government from which to advocate for reform. 40 They addressed each other, trained their students to follow their ideas, and rarely spoke to the larger public. 41

Sophonisba Breckinridge, Frances Kellor, Edith Abbott, and Katherine Davis were trained at the University of Chicago in political economy and sociology. Abbott briefly held an academic position at Wellesley, but she resigned to join the other women in applying her training to social research and social activism. Their expertise laid the foundation for the profession of social work. As grassroots activists, they worked with settlement house residents such as Jane Addams and Mary Simkhovitch, joined women’s voluntary organizations, investigated living and working conditions, and carved out careers in social welfare. 42

Male social scientists dismissed women’s expertise and eschewed grassroots work. 43 Breckinridge had earned a magna cum laude PhD in political science and economics, but she received no offers of an academic position, unlike her male colleagues. She was kept on at the university, but by 1920 the sociology department directed social sciences away from seeking practical solutions to everyday life that had linked scholarly inquiry with social responsibility. The female social scientists who had formed an intellectual core of the sociology department were put into a School of Social Services Administration and ultimately segregated into the division of social work. 44

Economic Progressivism

Economic Progressives identified unregulated corporate monopoly capitalism as a primary source of the country’s troubles. 45 They proposed a new regulatory state to mitigate the worst aspects of the system. Reforming the banking and currency systems, pursuing some measure of antitrust (antimonopoly) legislation, shifting from a largely laissez-faire economy, and moderately restructuring property relations would produce government in the public interest.

Antimonopoly Progressivism

Antimonopoly Progressivism required rethinking the relationship between business and government, introducing new legislation, and modifying a legal system that consistently sided with business. Congress and the presidency had to take leadership roles, but below them were Progressive groups such as the National Civic Federation, the NCL, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs pushing for significant policy change. These Progressives believed collusion between a small number of capitalist industrialists and politicians had badly damaged democracy. They especially feared that the system threatened to lead to class warfare.

The Interstate Commerce Act ( 1887 ) and the Sherman Antitrust Act ( 1890 ) began to consider the problems of unregulated laissez-faire capitalism and monopoly in restraint of trade. As president, Theodore Roosevelt ( 1901–1909 ) used congressional power to regulate commerce to attack corporate monopolistic restraint of trade. The Elkins Act ( 1903 ) gave Congress the power to regulate against predatory business practices; the Hepburn Act ( 1906 ) gave it authority to regulate railroad rates; the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act ( 1906 ) did the same for those industries. Roosevelt created the Department of Commerce and Labor ( 1903 ) to oversee interstate corporate practices and in 1906 empowered the Department of Agriculture to inspect and set standards in meat production, a move that led eventually to the Food and Drug Administration.

Presidential Progressivism

Roosevelt considered the president to be the guardian of the public welfare. His approach to conservation was a primary example of how he applied this belief. He agreed with the arguments of social scientists, professional organizations of engineers, and forestry bureau chief Gifford Pinchot that careful and efficient management and administration of natural resources was necessary to guarantee the country’s economic progress and preserve democratic opportunity. Roosevelt appointed a Public Lands Commission to manage public land in the West and appointed a National Conservation Commission to inventory the country’s resources so that sound business practices could be implemented. The commission’s three-volume report relied on scientific and social scientific methods to examine conservation issues. 46

William Howard Taft ( 1909–1913 ) refused to support further work by the Conservation Commission. He rejected new conservation proposals as violating congressional authority and possessing no legal standing. Taft’s administrative appointments, including Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger, favored opening public lands to more private development. Taft’s Progressivism was the more conservative Republican approach that focused on breaking up trusts because they were bad for business. 47 Taft sided with business when he signed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act ( 1909 ), which kept high tariffs on many essential goods that Progressives wanted reduced to aid consumers and small manufacturers. 48

In 1912 , the Republican Party split between Roosevelt and Taft. Political, economic, and social justice Progressives, including Robert La Follette, Charles McCarthy, Jane Addams, Frances Kellor, and George Perkins, a partner at J. P. Morgan and Company, helped establish the Progressive Party. They nominated Roosevelt, who envisioned a platform of “New Nationalism,” which promised to govern in the public interest and provide economic prosperity as a basic foundation of democratic citizenship. 49 Addams was unhappy with Roosevelt’s economic emphasis, but she saw him as social Progressives’ best hope.

Woodrow Wilson and Roosevelt received two-thirds of the vote, while Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs secured 6 percent of the votes. The election results indicated that the general population supported a middle way between socialism and Taft’s big business Progressivism. Wilson’s ( 1913–1921 ) “New Freedom” platform promised to curb the power of big business and close the growing wealth gap. As senator, La Follette helped push through Wilson’s reform legislation. The Clayton Antitrust Act ( 1914 ), the Federal Trade Commission ( 1914 ), and the Federal Reserve Act ( 1913 ) each curbed the power of big business and regulated banking. The Sixteenth Amendment ( 1913 ) authorized the federal income tax. The Seventeenth Amendment ( 1913 ) provided for the direct election of state legislators, who had previously been appointed by state legislatures.

Trade Union Progressivism

Under Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) fought to secure collective bargaining rights for male trade unionists. The AFL rejected the AALL proposals for worker compensation and insurance and never supported national worker compensation laws, although local federations supported state-level legislation. 50 Gompers preferred working with businessmen and politicians to secure the right to collective bargaining, the eight-hour day, and a voice for labor in production. The AFL never tried to form a Labor Party but advocated putting a labor agenda into mainstream party politics. 51 The Clayton Antitrust Act, which acknowledged that unions had the right to peaceful and lawful actions, was a victory for trade union Progressivism. The act did not provide everything that Gompers had demanded. Only New Deal legislation would offer more extensive protections to unions.

Gompers and the AFL rejected the AALL’s ideas, fearing that a more activist government might extend to regulating the labor of women and children. The AFL wanted sufficient economic security for white male workers, to move women out of the labor force. 52 Other labor Progressives sought the same end. Louis Brandeis and Father John Ryan promoted the living wage as a right of citizenship for male workers. Ryan acknowledged that unmarried women workers were entitled to a living wage, but he wanted labor reform to secure a family wage so that men would marry and families would produce children. 53 Hostile to organizing women, Gompers forced NWTUL leader Margaret Dreier Robins off the executive board of the Chicago Federation of Labor. 54

Municipal Ownership

On the local level, economic Progressives sought a middle way between socialism and the AFL’s single-minded trade unionism. AFL affiliates and Progressive politicians such as Cleveland’s Tom Johnson favored a municipal democracy that gave voters new powers. Municipal ownership of public utilities such as street railways promised the working class a way to protect their labor through the ballot. 55 Such reform would also destroy the franchise system. In Los Angeles, labor and socialists crafted a labor/socialist ticket to challenge the business/party control of the city and enact municipal ownership. A socialist administration in Milwaukee appealed to class interests to support an agenda that included municipal ownership. In Chicago, socialist Josephine Kaneko argued that she did not see much difference between socialism and women’s Progressive agenda for reform to benefit the common welfare. 56 Despite such flirtations between labor and socialists, labor remained attached to the Democratic Party.

Some cities achieved a measure of municipal ownership. Most middle-class urban Progressives deemed municipal ownership too socialist. They favored state economic regulation, led by experts, rather than ownership to break the monopoly in public utilities. 57

International Progressivism

Progressivism fostered new international engagement. The economic imperative to secure supplies of raw materials for industrial production, a messianic approach of bringing cultural and racial civilization around the globe, and belief in an international Progressivism that focused on international cooperation all pushed Progressives to think globally.

Securing Economic Progress

Although he was generally against Progressivism, President William McKinley annexed Hawaii ( 1898 ), saying that the country needed it even more than it had needed California. 58 The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine ( 1904 ) declared that intervention in the Caribbean was necessary to secure economic stability and forestall foreign interference in the area. Progressive Herbert Croly believed that the country needed to forcibly pacify some areas in the world in order for the United States to establish an American international system. 59 The Progressive Party platform ( 1912 ) declared it imperative to the people’s welfare that the country expand its foreign commerce. Between 1898 and 1941 , the United States invaded Cuba, acquired the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, took possession of Puerto Rico, colonized the Philippines and several Pacific islands, encouraged Panama to rebel against Colombia so that the United States could build the Panama Canal, invaded Mexico to protect oil interests, and intervened in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. To protect its possessions in the Pacific, Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Elihu Root finalized the Root-Takahira Agreement ( 1908 ), which acknowledged Japan’s control of Korea in return for its noninterference in the Philippines. American imperialism based on economic and financial desires became referred to as “Dollar Diplomacy.” 60

Mission of Civilization

Race, paternalism, and masculinity characterized elements of international Progressivism. Senator Albert Beveridge had supported Progressive proposals to abolish child labor and had favored regulating business and granting more rights to labor, but he viewed Filipinos as too backward to understand democracy and self-government. The United States was God’s chosen nation, with a divine mission to civilize the world; it should exercise its “spirit of progress” to organize the world. 61 William Jennings Bryan had previously been an anti-imperialist, but later, as Wilson’s secretary of state, he advocated intervening in Latin America to tutor backward people in self-government. 62 In speeches and writings, Roosevelt stressed that new international possessions required men to accept the strenuous life of responsibility for other people in order to maintain American domination of the world. 63 Social science likened Filipino men to children lacking the vigorous manhood necessary for self-government. 64 Beveridge contended that it was government’s responsibility to manufacture manhood. Empire could be the new frontier of white masculinity. 65 Roosevelt concluded a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” ( 1907 ) in which Japan agreed to stop issuing passports to Japanese laborers to immigrate to the United States.

Democracy and International Cooperation

A cadre of Progressives who had worked to extend their ideals into an international context did not welcome imperialism, dollar diplomacy, and war. 66 Addams rejected war as an anachronism that failed to produce a collective responsibility. La Follette rejoiced that failures in dollar diplomacy elevated humanity over property. Suffragists compared their lack of the vote to the plight of Filipinos. Belle Case La Follette opposed incursion into Mexico and denounced all militarism as driven by greed, suspicion, and love of power. 67

Many Progressives opposed war as an assault on an international collective humanity. Women organized peace marches and founded a Women’s Peace Party. Addams, Kelley, Frederic Howe, Lillian Wald of New York’s Henry Street Settlement, and Paul Kellogg, editor of the Progressive Survey , formed the American Union Against Militarism. 68 Addams, Simkhovitch, the sociologist Emily Greene Balch, and labor leader Leonora O’Reilly attended the International Women’s Peace Conference at The Hague in spring 1915 . Florence Kelley was denied a passport to travel. 69 The work of the American Red Cross in Europe during and after the war reflected the humanitarian collective impulse of Progressivism. 70

Entry into World War I, President Wilson’s assertion that it would make the world safe for democracy, and a growing xenophobia that demanded 100 percent loyalty produced a Progressive crisis. Addams remained firm against the war as antihumanitarian and was vilified for her pacifism. 71 La Follette voted against the declaration of war, charging that it was being promoted by business desires and that it was absurd to believe that it would make the world safe for democracy. He was accused of being pro-German, and Theodore Roosevelt said that he should be hung. 72 Labor leader Morris Hillquit and Florence Kelley formed the People’s Council of America to continue to pressure for peace. Under pressure to display patriotism, Progressive opposition to the war crumbled. Paul Kellogg declared that it was time to combat European militarism. The American Union Against Militarism dissolved. Herbert Croly’s New Republic urged the country to take a more active role in the war to create a new international league of peace and assume leadership of democratic nations. John Dewey proclaimed it a war of peoples, not armies, and stated that international reform would follow its conclusion. 73

Other Progressives comforted themselves that once the war was won, they could recommit to democratic agendas. Kelley, Grace Abbott, Josephine Goldmark, and Julia Lathrop helped organize the home front to maintain Progressive ideals. They monitored the condition of women workers, sat on the war department’s board controlling labor standards, and drafted insurance policies for military personnel. Suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt volunteered for the Women’s Advisory Committee of the Council of National Defense. Walter Lippmann worked on government projects. City planner John Nolen designed housing communities for war workers under the newly constituted United States Housing Corporation. 74

Suffragists protested the lack of democracy in the United States. As Wilson refused to support woman suffrage, members of the National Woman’s Party, led by Alice Paul, picketed the White House in protest. Picketers were arrested, Paul was put in solitary confinement in a psychiatric ward, and several women on a hunger strike were force-fed. Wilson capitulated to public outrage over the women’s treatment. The women were released, and Wilson urged passage of the suffrage amendment. 75 The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920 , but Progressives’ hopes that equal political rights would bring democratic equality were not fulfilled. The social justice Progressives split over whether to support the Equal Rights Amendment drawn up by the National Woman’s Party, fearing that it would negate the protective labor legislation they had achieved.

Racialized Progressivism

White Progressives failed to pursue racial equality. Most of them believed the country was not yet ready for such a cultural shift. Some of them believed in theories of racial inferiority. Southern Progressive figure Rebecca Latimer Felton defended racial lynching as a means to protect white women. 76 Other Progressives, such as Sophonisba Breckinridge, fought against racial exclusion policies and promoted interracial cooperation. 77 W. E. B. Du Bois and Addams helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( 1909 ).

African American Progressivism

African Americans believed that Progressive ideology should lead inevitably to racial equality. Du Bois spoke at public forums. 78 He supported the social justice Progressives’ agenda, attending the 1912 Progressive Party convention. Du Bois proposed a racial equality plank for the party platform. Jane Addams helped write the plank. Theodore Roosevelt rejected it, preferring the gradualist policy of Booker T. Washington. Addams objected but mused that perhaps it was not yet time for such a bold move. Racial justice would follow logically from dedication to social justice. 79 Du Bois shifted his support to Woodrow Wilson, while Ida B. Wells-Barnett backed Taft. In 1916 , African American women founded Colored Women’s Hughes clubs to support the Republican nominee. Hughes had reluctantly backed woman suffrage, and African American women viewed suffrage as the means to protect the race. Nannie Helen Burroughs worked through the National Association of Colored Women ( 1896 ) and the National Baptist Convention, demanding suffrage for African American women because they would use it wisely, for the benefit of the race. Burroughs lived in Washington, DC, where she witnessed the segregationist policies of the Wilson administration. She castigated African American men for having voted for him in 1912 . 80 African American Progressives hoped that serving in the military and organizing on the home front during the war would result in equal citizenship when the war ended. Instead, African Americans were subjected to more prejudice and violence. Southern senators blocked the Dyer antilynching bill ( 1922 ).

Immigration Restriction

Anti-immigrant sentiment had been building in the country since passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act ( 1882 ). Several attempts to pass a literacy test bill for immigrants, supported by the Immigration Restriction League ( 1894 ), failed. The forty-one volumes of the Senate-appointed Dillingham Commission ( 1911 ) concluded that immigrants were heavily responsible for the country’s problems and advocated the literacy test. Frances Kellor believed that all immigrants could be Americanized. Randolph Bourne advocated immigration as the path to Americans becoming internationalists. The New Republic , however, feared that excessive immigration would overwhelm an activist state and prevent it from solving social problems. Lillian Wald, Frederic Howe, and other Progressives organized the National Committee for Constructive Immigration Legislation ( 1916 ) hoping to forestall more restrictive measures. In the midst of war fever, Congress passed a literacy test bill over Wilson’s veto ( 1917 ).

100-percent Americanism

Progressives such as Kellor, Wald, and Addams believed that incorporating immigrants into a broad American culture would create a Progressive modern society. Theodore Roosevelt promoted a racialized version of American society. As president, he secured new laws ( 1903 , 1907 ) to exclude certain classes of immigrants—paupers, the insane, prostitutes, and radicals who might pose a threat to American standards of labor—that he deemed incapable of becoming good Americans. He created the Bureau of Immigration to enforce these provisions. The 1907 Immigration Act also stripped citizenship from women who married noncitizens, a situation only reversed in 1922 . At Roosevelt’s behest, Congress tightened requirements for naturalization. Wartime fever and the 1919 Red Scare intensified the search for 100 percent Americanism and undermined the alternative Progressive ideal of a cooperative Americanism. 81

Progressivism beyond the Progressive Era

The democratizing ideals of the Progressive era lived beyond the time period. A regulatory state to eliminate the worst effects of capitalism was created, as most Americans accepted that the federal state had to take on more social responsibility. After ratification of the suffrage amendment, the National American Woman Suffrage Association reconstituted as the National League of Women Voters ( 1920 ) to continue promoting an informed, democratic electorate. The New Deal implemented a substantial social justice Progressive agenda, with the NCL, the Children’s Bureau, and many women who had formed the earlier era’s agenda writing the legislation banning child labor, fostering new labor standards that included minimum wage and maximum hours, and mandating social security for the elderly. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs focused on environmental protection as a democratic right. A women’s joint congressional committee formed to continue pressing for social justice legislation. The National Association of Colored Women joined the committee.

Progressives can be legitimately criticized for not undertaking a more radical restructuring of American society. Some of them can be criticized for believing that they possessed the best vision for a modern, Progressive future. They can be faulted for not promoting racial equality or a new internationalism that might bring about global peace rather than war. Nonetheless, they never intended to undermine capitalism, so they could never truly embrace socialism. In the context of a society that continued to exalt individualism and suspect government interference and working within their own notions of democracy, they accomplished significant changes in American government and society. 82

Discussion of the Literature

The muckraking authors and journalists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries highlighted rapacious capitalism and characterized its wealthy beneficiaries as corrupting the country. In their exposés of the relationship between business and politics, Ida M. Tarbell, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair accused politicians of a corrupt bargain in pursuit of their own economic interests against the interests of the people. 83 Drawing upon these investigative writings, early analyses of Progressivism from Benjamin De Witt and Charles and Mary Beard interpreted Progressivism as a dualistic class struggle. On one side were wealthy and privileged special interests seeking to promote themselves at the expense of everyone else. On the other side was a broad public seeking to restore dignity and opportunity to the common people. 84

By the early 1950s, George Mowry and Richard Hofstadter contended that Progressivism was a movement of an older, professional, middle class seeking to reclaim its status, deference, and power, which had been usurped by a new corporate elite and a corrupt political class. 85 In the early 1960s, Samuel Hays argued that rather than being the product of a status revolution, Progressivism was the work of an urban upper class of new and younger leading Republican business and professional men. 86 Robert Wiebe shifted the analysis to describe a broader middle-class Progressivism of new professional men who wished to reorder society by applying bureaucratic and business-oriented skills to political and economic institutions. 87 In Wiebe’s organizational thesis, Progressives were modernizers with a structural-instrumentalist agenda. They rejected reliance on older values and cultural norms to order society and sought to create a modern reordered society with political and economic institutions run by men qualified to apply fiscal expertise, businesslike efficiency, and modern scientific expertise to solve problems and save democracy. 88 The emerging academic disciplines in the social sciences of economics, political economy and political science, and pragmatic education supplied the theoretical bases for this middle-class expert Progressivism. 89 Gabriel Kolko countered such analyses, arguing that Progressivism was a conservative movement promoted by business to protect itself. 90

Professional men and their organizations kept copious records from which scholars could draw this interpretation. By the late 1960s, scholars began to examine the role of other groups in reform movements, ask different questions, and utilize different sources. John Buenker called Progressivism a pluralistic effort, an ethnocultural struggle based on religious values in which urban immigrants and their democratic politicians resisted the old-stock Protestant elites whose Progressive agenda they believed was aimed at homogenizing American culture through policies such as Prohibition and immigration restriction. Ethnic groups were not anti-Progressive but promoted a new Progressive agenda of economic regulation and rights for labor. 91 In the face of conflicting interpretations, Peter Filene questioned whether there indeed was a Progressive movement. Daniel T. Rodgers posited that Progressivism could best be understood as a shift from party politics to interest groups politics. 92

In the last decades of the 20th century, historians began to distance themselves from the very notions of Progressivism. They criticized Progressivism as the ultimate end of a middle-class search for social control of the masses, or they focused on its class dimension. 93 Recent literature has reconsidered the meaning of the Progressive era. Revisiting his early 1980s essay, Daniel T. Rodgers proposed that the big picture of Progressivism was a reaction to the capitalist transformation of society. Robert D. Johnston saw a revived debate concerning the democratic nature of Progressivism and its connections to the present. 94 A recent book by Robyn Muncy takes another look at the emphasis on Progressivism as a social struggle through the biography of Colorado reformer Josephine Roche and her focus on creating social welfare reforms. 95

Primary Sources

There is a wealth of accessible primary source material on Progressives and Progressivism. Many of these documents can now be found through electronic sources such as HathiTrust, Archive.org, and Google Books.

Consult any of the writings of Jane Addams, Louis Brandeis, John R. Commons, Herbert Croly, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary Parker Follett, Frederic Howe, Florence Kelley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Muckrakers Lincoln Steffens , in The Shame of the Cities (1904) ; Jacob Riis , in How the Other Half Lives: Among the Tenements of New York (1890) ; and Upton Sinclair , in The Jungle (1906) , expose urban political corruption and social conditions. Ida M. Tarbell , in The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) ; and Frank Norris , in Octopus: A Story of California (1901) , expose business practices. The residents of Hull House published an investigative survey of living conditions in their neighborhood in Hull House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing out of Social Conditions ( 1895 ). Useful autobiographies are Tom Johnson , My Story (New York: B. W. Heubsch, 1913) ; Louise DeKoven Bowen , Growing Up with a City (New York: Macmillan, 1926) ; Jane Addams , Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1910) ; Ida B. Wells-Barnett , Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida. B. Wells , edited by Alfreda Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

Manuscript collections for national and local organizations and individuals include those of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, National Association of Colored Women, Ellen Gates Starr, Women’s City Club of New York, Sophonisba Breckinridge, National Women’s Trade Union League, National Consumers League, and Theodore Roosevelt. Publications of Progressive groups and organizations include Woman Citizen’s Library , Survey , Charities and Commons , New Republic , and National Municipal Review . Investigative reports include the six volumes of the the Pittsburgh Survey ( 1909–1914 ) and Reports of the Immigration Commission (Dillingham Commission), in forty-one volumes ( 1911 ).

Proceedings of organization conferences include those of the National Conferences on City Planning and Congestion, National Conferences on City Planning, International Conference on Women Workers to Promote Peace, and American Federation of Labor. Supreme Court rulings include Ritchie v. People ( 1895 ), Plessy v. Ferguson ( 1896 ), Holden v. Hardy ( 1898 ), Lochner v. New York ( 1905 ), and Muller v. Oregon ( 1908 ).

Links to Digital Materials

Cornell university, ilr school, kheel center.

1911 Triangle Fire .

The History Place

Lewis Hines photos of child labor .

Library of Congress

Child labor collection .

World War I posters .

The National American Woman Suffrage Association .

The National Woman’s Party and protesters .

Theodore Roosevelt .

The Conservation Movement .

University of Illinois Chicago, Special Collections

Settlement houses in Chicago .

Harvard University Library Open Collections Program

Immigration to the United States, 1789‐1930 .

Course: US history > Unit 7

Introduction to the age of empire
The age of empire
The Spanish-American War
Imperialism
The Progressives

The Progressive Era

The presidency of Theodore Roosevelt
Progressivism

The period of US history from the 1890s to the 1920s is usually referred to as the Progressive Era , an era of intense social and political reform aimed at making progress toward a better society.
Progressive Era reformers sought to harness the power of the federal government to eliminate unethical and unfair business practices, reduce corruption, and counteract the negative social effects of industrialization.
During the Progressive Era, protections for workers and consumers were strengthened, and women finally achieved the right to vote.

The problems of industrialization

The ideology and politics of progressivism, the dark side of progressivism, what do you think.

For more, see H.W. Brands, The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
For more on the Progressive movement, see Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
For more on Progressive ideology, see Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
See Walter Nugent, Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
For more on Wilson’s racial policies, see Eric S. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002), 3-4.
For more on eugenics in the United States, see Paul A. Lombardo, A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).

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Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era

In partnership with the HISTORY Channel

The name Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt conjures up many images: from hunter to teddy bear, from trust-buster to champion of capitalism, from Republican president to Bull Moose challenger. TR remains controversial, contradictory, and above all, larger than life. His larger-than-life image was matched by his actual life as he took on the roles of cattle rancher, author, urban reformer, environmentalist, police commissioner, governor, and president.

The era in which he lived, between the Civil War and World War I, was a transformational time in America, encompassing major cultural, economic, and political changes, and Roosevelt oversaw a balancing act of reform and regulation while accommodating the creation of the modern industrial society of the twentieth century. Learn more about TR and his times through essays, primary sources, videos, lesson plans, and timelines created by the Gilder Lehrman Institute.

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Essay: The Progressive Era

The Civil War increased the power of the federal government by forcing the Southern states to abolish slavery and paved the way for still greater increase in other matters after the war. People expected it to do more, and gave it more power so it could try. The defeat of the South, Reconstruction, and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment gave the national government growing power over the states and the people. The great and long-overdue liberating qualities of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments came, ironically, at a price to liberty: the government would need much greater power it if was going to attempt to enforce equality.

Also important to the constitutional history of the United States during this time were developments on the world stage. The ideas of German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels captured the attention of intellectuals and many others concerned with the conditions of the poor in industrialized nations.

Marx and Engels wrote “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto , 1848).

They argued that capitalism should be replaced by socialism—a term that broadly refers to government ownership of industries and collective, rather than private, ownership of property. Eventually, Marx and Engels envisioned a classless society giving “to each according to his need,” and taking “from each according to his ability.” There would no longer be any unfulfilled need, or even a need for government itself in a future communist society. The individual person, with rights at the center of the American tradition, would be replaced by socialized persons called “species beings.” Until that time the Communist party would rule a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the working class that the party claimed to represent.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of “The Communist Manifesto” (1848)

Socialism appealed to some but not many in the U.S. The Socialist Labor Party was founded in 1877, with goals of a classless society and collective ownership of industry and social services. Woodrow Wilson, while not claiming the label “Socialist,” determined that democracy and socialism were not all that different.

Writing as a leading professor in 1887, he wrote: “In a fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals” (Woodrow Wilson, Socialism and Democracy , 1887).

The idea that government or “the community,” has “an absolute right to determine its own destiny and that of its members” is a progressive one. The difference between the Founders’ and progressive’s visions can be summarized this way: The Founders believed citizens could best pursue happiness if government was limited to protecting the life, liberty, and property of individuals. They believed people were naturally inclined to favor themselves, and they structured government so that people’s self-interest and individual ambition would lead outstanding officials to check one another’s attempts to exercise more power than the Constitution allows. Unlike the framers of the Constitution, progressives believed that the ultimate aim of government should be promoting the development of all human faculties. Because “communities” have rights, those rights are more important than the personal liberty of any one individual in that community. Therefore, they believed, government should provide citizens with the environment and the means to improve themselves through government-sponsored programs and policies as well as economic redistribution of goods from the rich to the poor.

The twentieth century saw continued unrest over the conditions of workers in all industrial countries.

In the U.S., some organized labor demonstrations became violent. When more than 100,000 workers protested pay cuts in the 1894 Pullman strike, disrupting all rail service west of Detroit, President Cleveland eventually used the U.S. Army to break the protests. Many believed socialism promised the relief they sought. The Socialist Party of America was formed in 1901. International Workers of the World, a union that called for the end of capitalism and wage labor, formed in 1905. Industrial tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, in which more than one hundred workers died, further incited those demanding reforms. In 1917, the drama erupted in Europe as well, when the Bolshevik Revolution established Soviet Russia.

Strikers confront the Illinois National Guard during the 1894 Pullman Strike.

Some saw the integration of some socialist party goals into the Democratic Party platform as a compromise. While the Socialist Party never captured the presidency in the U.S., Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs received almost six percent of the popular vote in 1912. Socialist ideas were clearly part of the national conversation, and found their way into Progressive reforms of the period. Progressivism was not Marxism, but the two schools did agree that the community and its purposes should come before the individual and his preferences. These progressive reforms included the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments.

Wilson, who served as president from 1913-1919, advocated what we today call the living Constitution, or the idea that its interpretation should adapt to the times. The Founders’ Constitution, in which ambition is set to “counteract” ambition, owes more to Newtonian mechanics than to Darwinian evolution, Wilson argued. As such, the Founders’ Constitution is outdated and needs improvement. The evolutionary adaptability of species identified by Darwin suggests a constitutional model. He wrote:

“Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice” (Woodrow Wilson, “What is Progress?” 1912).

Wilson oversaw the implementation of progressive policies such as the introduction of the income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve System to attempt to manage the economy.

The Sixteenth Amendment authorized the national government to tax incomes. It was ratified in 1913, and Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1913 that same year. With a progressive income tax (where those who produce more pay more), the national government could now take wealth from some who had more and redistribute it to others who had less.

President Woodrow Wilson, a leading Progressive in the early twentieth century.

The Seventeenth Amendment, providing for the election of senators by the people of each state, was approved that same year. This amendment provided for the direct election of U.S. Senators. This change to the Constitution was a challenge to the principle of federalism. The Founders had carefully structured the two houses of Congress and given them different powers based on those differences. For example, representatives were elected by the people of each state for two year terms, and had the “power of the purse.” Senators were selected by their state legislatures, had six year terms, and had the duties of ratifying treaties, trying impeachments, and approving executive appointments. As Madison had written in Federalist No. 10, the design of Congress was meant to strike a balance, allowing the people to govern themselves while still protecting individual rights and the powers of states (James Madison, Federalist No. 10 , 1788). The Senate was, to put it another way, a “check” against democracy and the tyranny of the majority. The Seventeenth Amendment loosened this “check and balance.”

Prohibition of the sale of liquor was a drastic progressive reform for the improvement of popular morality.

While the Temperance movement began as a female-dominated attempt to persuade individuals to abstain from drinking, it later shifted to a campaign to use the force of law to ban the manufacture and sale of alcohol. The Eighteenth Amendment (1920) banned the manufacture, sale, or transport of intoxicating beverages and the Volstead Act codified it in U.S. law. A massive failure in every way, Prohibition was repealed with the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933.

The last of the progressive amendments to the Constitution, the Nineteenth Amendment barred states from denying female citizens the right to vote in federal elections. This amendment extended the right to vote to half the population which had, in most states, been denied the right to cast votes for their representatives. Interestingly, some woman’s suffragists campaigned for the extension of the franchise to women not on women’s equality, but on women’s claimed superior moral character, which was needed to guide the U.S. down the right paths. By acknowledging and basing their arguments on natural differences between the sexes, the suffrage movement differed from modern feminism which emphasizes the view that the sexes are essentially the same.

The Progressive Era represented a dramatic shift when it came to many peoples’ understanding of democracy, the purpose of government, and the role it should play in our lives. It also set the stage for the New Deal, and a definition of “rights” that was also a dramatic break from tradition.

Suffragettes march in New York City in 1912 for the right of women to vote.

The Progressive Era

Part of the Civil War’s legacy was a shift in the role of the national government. The defeat of the South, Reconstruction, and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment gave the national government growing power over the states and the people. The Fourteenth Amendment gave the national government power (though exactly how much power was still being debated) to ensure state laws did not violate the rights of the freedmen. Additional amendments during the Progressive Era (the 1890s - 1920s) continued this transfer of power to the national government. In the name of giving power to the people, the national government was given power to tax incomes; states lost their representation in Congress, the manufacture and sale of alcohol was banned, and women achieved the right to vote.

“It would be an irony of fate, if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.”

Wilson’s Presidency both overlapped with and was in many ways definitive of the politics of the Progressive Era (approx. 1890-1920).

The term “Progressive” was broadly defined, encompassing a wide array of policies and ideologies – often in contradiction with one another – which sought to mitigate social and economic inequalities at the turn-of-the-20 th century. The era witnessed the rapid expansion and overcrowding of cities, inadequate housing, unregulated labor, poor public health, farmer indebtedness and sharecropping – especially for southern Blacks, child labor, and the emergence of a wealth gap in which 1% of Americans owned nearly 90% of the nation’s wealth. While their solutions differed and often conflicted, Progressives shared the view that a proactive, expanded government was necessary to fix society’s ills.

Progressives in both the Republican and Democratic Parties (including, but not limited to, socialists, populists, and anarchists) sought solutions in the form of child labor laws, women’s suffrage, unionization, public health services, Black civil rights, and economic regulation and taxes as well as immigration restriction, segregation, and the prohibition of alcohol. All of these ideologies could fall within the “Progressive” umbrella.

Woodrow Wilson claimed his place within the Progressive movement with his economic reform package, "the New Freedom." This agenda, which passed Congress at the end of 1913, included tariff, banking, and labor reforms and introduced the income tax. Wilson also expanded the executive branch with the creation of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Internal Revenue Service. His emphasis on efficiency and bureaucracy fit him squarely within the Progressive movement.

During Wilson’s terms, Congress passed two constitutional amendments: prohibition (18th); and women's suffrage (19th)—both Progressive agendas. Another amendment was ratified while Wilson was President: direct election of Senators (17th) on April 8th 1913. (The 16th amendment, which concerns income tax, was ratified in February 1913, after Wilson was elected but before he took office. The ratification was proclaimed by Taft’s Secretary of State, Philander Knox).

Wilson’s Progressive legacy was also solidified through the appointment of his close friend Justice Louis Brandies to the Supreme Court as the first Jewish American to sit on the nation’s highest court. Justice Brandeis was a staunch proponent of the right to free speech and the right to privacy while he supported the regulation of business and anti-monopoly legislation championed by Wilson’s economic plan.

Wilson also embraced and encouraged new technology . He opened the Panama Canal, started airmail service, endorsed the creation of an interstate highway system, appeared in one of the first filmed campaign advertisements, used a microphone for the amplification of his voice, and witnessed the birth of radio.

These accomplishments, however, were all too often achieved at the expense of African Americans, women, immigrants, and Native Americans. Legal scholars have revealed the ways in which the income tax codes and banking policies often disadvantaged African American families. What is more, Wilson couched his embrace of segregation as part of his Progressive commitment to efficiency, arguing (insincerely) that segregation reduced friction among federal workers and increased productivity. And though Wilson vetoed the 1917 Immigration Law which established the Asiatic Barred Zone and a Literacy Test for entry, along with other restrictive measures, he nonetheless voiced support for much of the law and his veto was ultimately overridden.

Your ticket for the: Progressive Era Politics

Progressive era politics.

THE AMERICAN YAWP

20. the progressive era.

This sketch shows a number of men wearing top hats labeled Class Privelege, Trust, Monopoly, and Bribery. They care a torn banner that says Rule or Ruin.

From an undated William Jennings Bryan campaign print, “Shall the People Rule?” Library of Congress .

*The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click here to improve this chapter.*

I. Introduction

Ii. mobilizing for reform, iii. women’s movements, iv. targeting the trusts, v. progressive environmentalism, vi. jim crow and african american life, vii. conclusion, viii. primary sources, ix. reference material.

“Never in the history of the world was society in so terrific flux as it is right now,” Jack London wrote in The Iron Heel , his 1908 dystopian novel in which a corporate oligarchy comes to rule the United States. He wrote, “The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fiber and structure of society. One can only dimly feel these things, but they are in the air, now, today.” 1

The many problems associated with the Gilded Age—the rise of unprecedented fortunes and unprecedented poverty, controversies over imperialism, urban squalor, a near-war between capital and labor, loosening social mores, unsanitary food production, the onrush of foreign immigration, environmental destruction, and the outbreak of political radicalism—confronted Americans. Terrible forces seemed out of control and the nation seemed imperiled. Farmers and workers had been waging political war against capitalists and political conservatives for decades, but then, slowly, toward the end of the nineteenth century a new generation of middle-class Americans interjected themselves into public life and advocated new reforms to tame the runaway world of the Gilded Age.

Widespread dissatisfaction with new trends in American society spurred the Progressive Era, named for the various progressive movements that attracted various constituencies around various reforms. Americans had many different ideas about how the country’s development should be managed and whose interests required the greatest protection. Reformers sought to clean up politics; Black Americans continued their long struggle for civil rights; women demanded the vote with greater intensity while also demanding a more equal role in society at large; and workers demanded higher wages, safer workplaces, and the union recognition that would guarantee these rights. Whatever their goals, reform became the word of the age, and the sum of their efforts, whatever their ultimate impact or original intentions, gave the era its name.

In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan caught fire. The doors of the factory had been chained shut to prevent employees from taking unauthorized breaks (the managers who held the keys saved themselves, but left over two hundred women behind). A rickety fire ladder on the side of the building collapsed immediately. Women lined the rooftop and windows of the ten-story building and jumped, landing in a “mangled, bloody pulp.” Life nets held by firemen tore at the impact of the falling bodies. Among the onlookers, “women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines.” By the time the fire burned itself out, 71 workers were injured and 146 had died. 2

Photographs like this one made real the potential atrocities resulting from unsafe working conditions, as policemen place the bodies of workers burnt alive in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire into coffins. “Bodies from Washington Place fire, Mar 1911,” March 25, 1911. Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98502780/.

Policemen place the bodies of workers who were burned alive in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire into coffins. Photographs like this made real the atrocities that could result from unsafe working conditions. March 25, 1911. Library of Congress .

A year before, the Triangle workers had gone on strike demanding union recognition, higher wages, and better safety conditions. Remembering their workers’ “chief value,” the owners of the factory decided that a viable fire escape and unlocked doors were too expensive and called in the city police to break up the strike. After the 1911 fire, reporter Bill Shepherd reflected, “I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike last year in which the same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer.” 3 Former Triangle worker and labor organizer Rose Schneiderman said, “This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers . . . the life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred! There are so many of us for one job, it matters little if 140-odd are burned to death.” 4 After the fire, Triangle owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were brought up on manslaughter charges. They were acquitted after less than two hours of deliberation. The outcome continued a trend in the industrializing economy that saw workers’ deaths answered with little punishment of the business owners responsible for such dangerous conditions. But as such tragedies mounted and working and living conditions worsened and inequality grew, it became increasingly difficult to develop justifications for this new modern order.

Events such as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire convinced many Americans of the need for reform, but the energies of activists were needed to spread a new commitment to political activism and government interference in the economy. Politicians, journalists, novelists, religious leaders, and activists all raised their voices to push Americans toward reform.

Reformers turned to books and mass-circulation magazines to publicize the plight of the nation’s poor and the many corruptions endemic to the new industrial order. Journalists who exposed business practices, poverty, and corruption—labeled by Theodore Roosevelt as “muckrakers”—aroused public demands for reform. Magazines such as McClure’s detailed political corruption and economic malfeasance. The muckrakers confirmed Americans’ suspicions about runaway wealth and political corruption. Ray Stannard Baker, a journalist whose reports on U.S. Steel exposed the underbelly of the new corporate capitalism, wrote, “I think I can understand now why these exposure articles took such a hold upon the American people. It was because the country, for years, had been swept by the agitation of soap-box orators, prophets crying in the wilderness, and political campaigns based upon charges of corruption and privilege which everyone believed or suspected had some basis of truth, but which were largely unsubstantiated.” 5

Journalists shaped popular perceptions of Gilded Age injustice. In 1890, New York City journalist Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives , a scathing indictment of living and working conditions in the city’s slums. Riis not only vividly described the squalor he saw, he documented it with photography, giving readers an unflinching view of urban poverty. Riis’s book led to housing reform in New York and other cities and helped instill the idea that society bore at least some responsibility for alleviating poverty. 6 In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle , a novel dramatizing the experiences of a Lithuanian immigrant family who moved to Chicago to work in the stockyards. Although Sinclair intended the novel to reveal the brutal exploitation of labor in the meatpacking industry, and thus to build support for the socialist movement, its major impact was to lay bare the entire process of industrialized food production. The growing invisibility of slaughterhouses and livestock production for urban consumers had enabled unsanitary and unsafe conditions. “The slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors,” wrote Sinclair, “like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.” 7 Sinclair’s exposé led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

Photograph of a woman sitting in a dirty room and holding a baby.

Jacob Riis, “Home of an Italian Ragpicker.” ca. 1888-1889. Wikimedia.

Of course, it was not only journalists who raised questions about American society. One of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward, was a national sensation. In it, a man falls asleep in Boston in 1887 and awakens in 2000 to find society radically altered. Poverty and disease and competition gave way as new industrial armies cooperated to build a utopia of social harmony and economic prosperity. Bellamy’s vision of a reformed society enthralled readers, inspired hundreds of Bellamy clubs, and pushed many young readers onto the road to reform. 8 It led countless Americans to question the realities of American life in the nineteenth century:

“I am aware that you called yourselves free in the nineteenth century. The meaning of the word could not then, however, have been at all what it is at present, or you certainly would not have applied it to a society of which nearly every member was in a position of galling personal dependence upon others as to the very means of life, the poor upon the rich, or employed upon employer, women upon men, children upon parents.” 9

But Americans were urged to action not only by books and magazines but by preachers and theologians, too. Confronted by both the benefits and the ravages of industrialization, many Americans asked themselves, “What Would Jesus Do?” In 1896, Charles Sheldon, a Congregational minister in Topeka, Kansas, published In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? The novel told the story of Henry Maxwell, a pastor in a small Midwestern town one day confronted by an unemployed migrant who criticized his congregation’s lack of concern for the poor and downtrodden. Moved by the man’s plight, Maxwell preached a series of sermons in which he asked his congregation: “Would it not be true, think you, that if every Christian in America did as Jesus would do, society itself, the business world, yes, the very political system under which our commercial and government activity is carried on, would be so changed that human suffering would be reduced to a minimum?” 10 Sheldon’s novel became a best seller, not only because of its story but because the book’s plot connected with a new movement transforming American religion: the social gospel.

The social gospel emerged within Protestant Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century. It emphasized the need for Christians to be concerned for the salvation of society, and not simply individual souls. Instead of just caring for family or fellow church members, social gospel advocates encouraged Christians to engage society; challenge social, political, and economic structures; and help those less fortunate than themselves. Responding to the developments of the industrial revolution in America and the increasing concentration of people in urban spaces, with its attendant social and economic problems, some social gospelers went so far as to advocate a form of Christian socialism, but all urged Americans to confront the sins of their society.

One of the most notable advocates of the social gospel was Walter Rauschenbusch. After graduating from Rochester Theological Seminary, in 1886 Rauschenbusch accepted the pastorate of a German Baptist church in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York City, where he confronted rampant crime and stark poverty, problems not adequately addressed by the political leaders of the city. Rauschenbusch joined with fellow reformers to elect a new mayoral candidate, but he also realized that a new theological framework had to reflect his interest in society and its problems. He revived Jesus’s phrase, “the Kingdom of God,” claiming that it encompassed every aspect of life and made every part of society a purview of the proper Christian. Like Charles Sheldon’s fictional Rev. Maxwell, Rauschenbusch believed that every Christian, whether they were a businessperson, a politician, or a stay-at-home parent, should ask themselves what they could do to enact the kingdom of God on Earth. 11

“The social gospel is the old message of salvation, but enlarged and intensified. The individualistic gospel has taught us to see the sinfulness of every human heart and has inspired us with faith in the willingness and power of God to save every soul that comes to him. But it has not given us an adequate understanding of the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it. It has not evoked faith in the will and power of God to redeem the permanent institutions of human society from their inherited guilt of oppression and extortion. Both our sense of sin and our faith in salvation have fallen short of the realities under its teaching. The social gospel seeks to bring men under repentance for their collective sins and to create a more sensitive and more modern conscience. It calls on us for the faith of the old prophets who believed in the salvation of nations.” 12

Glaring blind spots persisted within the proposals of most social gospel advocates. As men, they often ignored the plight of women, and thus most refused to support women’s suffrage. Many were also silent on the plight of African Americans, Native Americans, and other oppressed minority groups. However, the writings of Rauschenbusch and other social gospel proponents had a profound influence on twentieth-century American life. Most immediately, they fueled progressive reform. But they also inspired future activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., who envisioned a “beloved community” that resembled Rauschenbusch’s “Kingdom of God.”

Photograph of suffragists marching in New York City in front of a sizable crowd.

Suffragists campaigned tirelessly for the vote in the first two decades of the twentieth century, taking to the streets in public displays like this 1915 pre-election parade in New York City. During this one event, 20,000 women defied the gender norms that tried to relegate them to the private sphere and deny them the vote. 1915. Wikimedia .

Reform opened new possibilities for women’s activism in American public life and gave new impetus to the long campaign for women’s suffrage. Much energy for women’s work came from female “clubs,” social organizations devoted to various purposes. Some focused on intellectual development; others emphasized philanthropic activities. Increasingly, these organizations looked outward, to their communities and to the place of women in the larger political sphere.

Women’s clubs flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1890s women formed national women’s club federations. Particularly significant in campaigns for suffrage and women’s rights were the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (formed in New York City in 1890) and the National Association of Colored Women (organized in Washington, D.C., in 1896), both of which were dominated by upper-middle-class, educated, northern women. Few of these organizations were biracial, a legacy of the sometimes uneasy midnineteenth-century relationship between socially active African Americans and white women. Rising American prejudice led many white female activists to ban inclusion of their African American sisters.

Black women produced vibrant organizations that could promise racial uplift and civil rights for all Black Americans as well as equal rights for all women. Black abolitionist Mary Jane Richardson Jones organized Black women in Chicago around settlement work, moral uplift, and suffrage. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who had also worked for abolition and suffrage, worked with club women in Boston and organized, in 1895, the First National Conference of the Colored Women of America. The following year, Mary Church Terrell and other black activists formed the National Association of Colored Women, later known as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. These leagues of service-oriented women’s organizations provided powerful networks to organize and amplify Black women’s efforts not only to secure suffrage but to challenge discrimination and uplift Black communities across the United States. 13

Other women worked through churches and moral reform organizations to clean up American life. And still others worked as moral vigilantes. The fearsome Carrie A. Nation, an imposing woman who believed she worked God’s will, won headlines for destroying saloons. In Wichita, Kansas, on December 27, 1900, Nation took a hatchet and broke bottles and bars at the luxurious Carey Hotel. Arrested and charged with causing $3,000 in damages, Nation spent a month in jail before the county dismissed the charges on account of “a delusion to such an extent as to be practically irresponsible.” But Nation’s “hatchetation” drew national attention. Describing herself as “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like,” she continued her assaults, and days later she smashed two more Wichita bars. 14

Few women followed in Nation’s footsteps, and many more worked within more reputable organizations. Nation, for instance, had founded a chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), but the organization’s leaders described her as “unwomanly and unchristian.” The WCTU was founded in 1874 as a modest temperance organization devoted to combating the evils of drunkenness. But then, from 1879 to 1898, Frances Willard invigorated the organization by transforming it into a national political organization, embracing a “do everything” policy that adopted any and all reasonable reforms that would improve social welfare and advance women’s rights. WCTU women worked to alleviate urban poverty, pursued prison reform, championed the eight-hour workday, pushed for child labor laws, advocated “h ome protection,” and fought for numerous other progressive causes. Temperance, and then the full prohibition of alcohol, however, always loomed large.

Many American reformers associated alcohol with nearly every social ill. Alcohol was blamed for domestic abuse, poverty, crime, and disease. The 1912 Anti-Saloon League Yearbook , for instance, presented charts indicating comparable increases in alcohol consumption alongside rising divorce rates. The WCTU called alcohol a “home wrecker.” More insidiously, perhaps, reformers also associated alcohol with cities and immigrants, necessarily maligning America’s immigrants, Catholics, and working classes in their crusade against liquor. Still, reformers believed that the abolition of “strong drink” would bring about social progress, obviate the need for prisons and insane asylums, save women and children from domestic abuse, and usher in a more just, progressive society.

Powerful female activists emerged out of the club movement and temperance campaigns. Perhaps no American reformer matched Jane Addams in fame, energy, and innovation. Born in Cedarville, Illinois, in 1860, Addams lost her mother by age two and lived under the attentive care of her father. At seventeen, she left home to attend Rockford Female Seminary. An idealist, Addams sought the means to make the world a better place. She believed that well-educated women of means, such as herself, lacked practical strategies for engaging everyday reform. After four years at Rockford, Addams embarked on a multiyear “grand tour” of Europe. She found herself drawn to English settlement houses, a kind of prototype for social work in which philanthropists embedded themselves among communities and offered services to disadvantaged populations. After visiting London’s Toynbee Hall in 1887, Addams returned to the United States and in 1889 founded Hull House in Chicago with her longtime confidant and companion Ellen Gates Starr. 15

The Settlement … is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other … It must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy. 16

Hull House workers provided for their neighbors by running a nursery and a kindergarten, administering classes for parents and clubs for children, and organizing social and cultural events for the community. Reformer Florence Kelley, who stayed at Hull House from 1891 to 1899, convinced Addams to move into the realm of social reform. 17 Hull House began exposing conditions in local sweatshops and advocated for the organization of workers. She called the conditions caused by urban poverty and industrialization a “social crime.” Hull House workers surveyed their community and produced statistics on poverty, disease, and living conditions. Addams began pressuring politicians. Together Kelley and Addams petitioned legislators to pass antisweatshop legislation that limited the hours of work for women and children to eight per day. Yet Addams was an upper-class white Protestant woman who, like many reformers, refused to embrace more radical policies. While Addams called labor organizing a “social obligation,” she also warned the labor movement against the “constant temptation towards class warfare.” Addams, like many reformers, favored cooperation between rich and poor and bosses and workers, whether cooperation was a realistic possibility or not. 18

Addams became a kind of celebrity. In 1912, she became the first woman to give a nominating speech at a major party convention when she seconded the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt as the Progressive Party’s candidate for president. Her campaigns for social reform and women’s rights won headlines and her voice became ubiquitous in progressive politics. 19

Addams’s advocacy grew beyond domestic concerns. Beginning with her work in the Anti-Imperialist League during the Spanish-American War, Addams increasingly began to see militarism as a drain on resources better spent on social reform. In 1907 she wrote Newer Ideals of Peace , a book that would become for many a philosophical foundation of pacifism. Addams emerged as a prominent opponent of America’s entry into World War I. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. 20

It would be suffrage, ultimately, that would mark the full emergence of women in American public life. Generations of women—and, occasionally, men—had pushed for women’s suffrage. Suffragists’ hard work resulted in slow but encouraging steps forward during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Notable victories were won in the West, where suffragists mobilized large numbers of women and male politicians were open to experimental forms of governance. By 1911, six western states had passed suffrage amendments to their constitutions.

This photograph of suffragists shows women holding signs that say "Mr. President how long must women wait for liberty?" and "Mr. President what will you do for woman suffrage?"

Women protested silently in front of the White House for over two years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Here, women represent their colleges as they picket the White House in support of women’s suffrage. 1917. Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-31799).

Women’s suffrage was typically entwined with a wide range of reform efforts. Many suffragists argued that women’s votes were necessary to clean up politics and combat social evils. By the 1890s, for example, the WCTU, then the largest women’s organization in America, endorsed suffrage. An alliance of working-class and middle- and upper-class women organized the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) in 1903 and campaigned for the vote alongside the National American Woman Suffrage Association, a leading suffrage organization composed largely of middle- and upper-class women. WTUL members viewed the vote as a way to further their economic interests and to foster a new sense of respect for working-class women. “What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist,” said Rose Schneiderman, a WTUL leader, during a 1912 speech. “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.” 21

Many suffragists adopted a much crueler message. Some, even outside the South, argued that white women’s votes were necessary to maintain white supremacy. Many white American women argued that enfranchising white upper- and middle-class women would counteract Black voters. These arguments even stretched into international politics. But whether the message advocated gender equality, class politics, or white supremacy, the suffrage campaign was winning.

The final push for women’s suffrage came on the eve of World War I. Determined to win the vote, the National American Woman Suffrage Association developed a dual strategy that focused on the passage of state voting rights laws and on the ratification of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Meanwhile, a new, more militant, suffrage organization emerged on the scene. Led by Alice Paul, the National Woman’s Party took to the streets to demand voting rights, organizing marches and protests that mobilized thousands of women. Beginning in January 1917, National Woman’s Party members also began to picket the White House, an action that led to the arrest and imprisonment of over 150 women. 22

In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson declared his support for the women’s suffrage amendment, and two years later women’s suffrage became a reality. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, women from all walks of life mobilized to vote. They were driven by the promise of change but also in some cases by their anxieties about the future. Much had changed since their campaign began; the United States was now more industrial than not, increasingly more urban than rural. The activism and activities of these new urban denizens also gave rise to a new American culture.

In one of the defining books of the Progressive Era, The Promise of American Life , Herbert Croly argued that because “the corrupt politician has usurped too much of the power which should be exercised by the people,” the “millionaire and the trust have appropriated too many of the economic opportunities formerly enjoyed by the people.” Croly and other reformers believed that wealth inequality eroded democracy and reformers had to win back for the people the power usurped by the moneyed trusts. But what exactly were these “trusts,” and why did it suddenly seem so important to reform them? 23

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a trust was a monopoly or cartel associated with the large corporations of the Gilded and Progressive Eras who entered into agreements—legal or otherwise—or consolidations to exercise exclusive control over a specific product or industry under the control of a single entity. Certain types of monopolies, specifically for intellectual property like copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, are protected under the Constitution “to promote the progress of science and useful arts,” but for powerful entities to control entire national markets was something wholly new, and, for many Americans, wholly unsettling.

Illustration shows a "Standard Oil" storage tank as an octopus with many tentacles wrapped around the steel, copper, and shipping industries, as well as a state house, the U.S. Capitol, and one tentacle reaching for the White House. The only building not yet within reach of the octopus is the White House—President Teddy Roosevelt had won a reputation as a “trust buster.” Udo Keppler, “Next!” (1904). Via Library of Congress (LC-USZCN4-122).

An illustration shows a “Standard Oil” storage tank as an octopus with many tentacles wrapped around the steel, copper, and shipping industries, as well as a statehouse, the U.S. Capitol, and one tentacle reaching for the White House. The only building not yet within reach of the octopus is the White House—President Teddy Roosevelt had won a reputation as a trustbuster. Udo Keppler, “Next!” 1904. Library of Congress (LC-USZCN4-122).

The rapid industrialization, technological advancement, and urban growth of the 1870s and 1880s triggered major changes in the way businesses structured themselves. The Second Industrial Revolution, made possible by available natural resources, growth in the labor supply through immigration, increasing capital, new legal economic entities, novel production strategies, and a growing national market, was commonly asserted to be the natural product of the federal government’s laissez faire, or “hands off,” economic policy. An unregulated business climate, the argument went, allowed for the growth of major trusts, most notably Andrew Carnegie’s Carnegie Steel (later consolidated with other producers as U.S. Steel) and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. Each displayed the vertical and horizontal integration strategies common to the new trusts: Carnegie first used vertical integration by controlling every phase of business (raw materials, transportation, manufacturing, distribution), and Rockefeller adhered to horizontal integration by buying out competing refineries. Once dominant in a market, critics alleged, the trusts could artificially inflate prices, bully rivals, and bribe politicians.

Between 1897 and 1904, over four thousand companies were consolidated down into 257 corporate firms. As one historian wrote, “By 1904 a total of 318 trusts held 40% of US manufacturing assets and boasted a capitalization of $7 billion, seven times bigger than the US national debt.” 24 With the twentieth century came the age of monopoly. Mergers and the aggressive business policies of wealthy men such as Carnegie and Rockefeller earned them the epithet robber barons . Their cutthroat stifling of economic competition, mistreatment of workers, and corruption of politics sparked an opposition that pushed for regulations to rein in the power of monopolies. The great corporations became a major target of reformers.

Big business, whether in meatpacking, railroads, telegraph lines, oil, or steel, posed new problems for the American legal system. Before the Civil War, most businesses operated in a single state. They might ship goods across state lines or to other countries, but they typically had offices and factories in just one state. Individual states naturally regulated industry and commerce. But extensive railroad routes crossed several state lines and new mass-producing corporations operated across the nation, raising questions about where the authority to regulate such practices rested. During the 1870s, many states passed laws to check the growing power of vast new corporations. In the Midwest, farmers formed a network of organizations that were part political pressure group, part social club, and part mutual aid society. Together they pushed for so-called Granger laws that regulated railroads and other new companies. Railroads and others opposed these regulations because they restrained profits and because of the difficulty of meeting the standards of each state’s separate regulatory laws. In 1877, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld these laws in a series of rulings, finding in cases such as Munn v. Illinois and Stone v. Wisconsin that railroads and other companies of such size necessarily affected the public interest and could thus be regulated by individual states. In Munn , the court declared, “Property does become clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence, and affect the community at large. When, therefore, one devoted his property to a use in which the public has an interest, he, in effect, grants to the public an interest in that use, and must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good, to the extent of the interest he has thus created.” 25

Later rulings, however, conceded that only the federal government could constitutionally regulate interstate commerce and the new national businesses operating it. And as more and more power and capital and market share flowed to the great corporations, the onus of regulation passed to the federal government. In 1887, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which established the Interstate Commerce Commission to stop discriminatory and predatory pricing practices. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 aimed to limit anticompetitive practices, such as those institutionalized in cartels and monopolistic corporations. It stated that a “trust . . . or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce . . . is declared to be illegal” and that those who “monopolize . . . any part of the trade or commerce . . . shall be deemed guilty.” 26 The Sherman Anti-Trust Act declared that not all monopolies were illegal, only those that “unreasonably” stifled free trade. The courts seized on the law’s vague language, however, and the act was turned against itself, manipulated and used, for instance, to limit the growing power of labor unions. Only in 1914, with the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, did Congress attempt to close loopholes in previous legislation.

Aggression against the trusts—and the progressive vogue for “trust busting”—took on new meaning under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, a reform-minded Republican who ascended to the presidency after the death of William McKinley in 1901. Roosevelt’s youthful energy and confrontational politics captivated the nation.” 27 Roosevelt was by no means antibusiness. Instead, he envisioned his presidency as a mediator between opposing forces, such as between labor unions and corporate executives. Despite his own wealthy background, Roosevelt pushed for antitrust legislation and regulations, arguing that the courts could not be relied on to break up the trusts. Roosevelt also used his own moral judgment to determine which monopolies he would pursue. Roosevelt believed that there were good and bad trusts, necessary monopolies and corrupt ones. Although his reputation as a trust buster was wildly exaggerated, he was the first major national politician to go after the trusts. “The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts,” he said, “are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown.” 28

His first target was the Northern Securities Company, a “holding” trust in which several wealthy bankers, most famously J. P. Morgan, used to hold controlling shares in all the major railroad companies in the American Northwest. Holding trusts had emerged as a way to circumvent the Sherman Anti-Trust Act: by controlling the majority of shares, rather than the principal, Morgan and his collaborators tried to claim that it was not a monopoly. Roosevelt’s administration sued and won in court, and in 1904 the Northern Securities Company was ordered to disband into separate competitive companies. Two years later, in 1906, Roosevelt signed the Hepburn Act, allowing the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate best practices and set reasonable rates for the railroads.

Roosevelt was more interested in regulating corporations than breaking them apart. Besides, the courts were slow and unpredictable. However, his successor after 1908, William Howard Taft, firmly believed in court-oriented trust busting and during his four years in office more than doubled the number of monopoly breakups that occurred during Roosevelt’s seven years in office. Taft notably went after U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation formed from the consolidation of nearly every major American steel producer.

Trust busting and the handling of monopolies dominated the election of 1912. When the Republican Party spurned Roosevelt’s return to politics and renominated the incumbent Taft, Roosevelt left and formed his own coalition, the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party. Whereas Taft took an all-encompassing view on the illegality of monopolies, Roosevelt adopted a New Nationalism program, which once again emphasized the regulation of already existing corporations or the expansion of federal power over the economy. In contrast, Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic Party nominee, emphasized in his New Freedom agenda neither trust busting nor federal regulation but rather small-business incentives so that individual companies could increase their competitive chances. Yet once he won the election, Wilson edged nearer to Roosevelt’s position, signing the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914. The Clayton Anti-Trust Act substantially enhanced the Sherman Act, specifically regulating mergers and price discrimination and protecting labor’s access to collective bargaining and related strategies of picketing, boycotting, and protesting. Congress further created the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the Clayton Act, ensuring at least some measure of implementation. 29

While the three presidents—Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson—pushed the development and enforcement of antitrust law, their commitments were uneven, and trust busting itself manifested the political pressure put on politicians by the workers, farmers, and progressive writers who so strongly drew attention to the ramifications of trusts and corporate capital on the lives of everyday Americans.

The potential scope of environmental destruction wrought by industrial capitalism was unparalleled in human history. Professional bison hunting expeditions nearly eradicated an entire species, industrialized logging companies denuded whole forests, and chemical plants polluted an entire region’s water supply. As American development and industrialization marched westward, reformers embraced environmental protections.

Historians often cite preservation and conservation as two competing strategies that dueled for supremacy among environmental reformers during the Progressive Era. The tensions between these two approaches crystalized in the debate over a proposed dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in California. The fight revolved around the provision of water for San Francisco. Engineers identified the location where the Tuolumne River ran through Hetch Hetchy as an ideal site for a reservoir. The project had been suggested in the 1880s but picked up momentum in the early twentieth century. But the valley was located inside Yosemite National Park. (Yosemite was designated a national park in 1890, though the land had been set aside earlier in a grant approved by President Lincoln in 1864.) The debate over Hetch Hetchy revealed two distinct positions on the value of the valley and on the purpose of public lands.

John Muir, a naturalist, a writer, and founder of the Sierra Club, invoked the “God of the Mountains” in his defense of the valley in its supposedly pristine condition. Gifford Pinchot, arguably the father of American forestry and a key player in the federal management of national forests, meanwhile emphasized what he understood to be the purpose of conservation: “to take every part of the land and its resources and put it to that use in which it will serve the most people.” Muir took a wider view of what the people needed, writing that “everybody needs beauty as well as bread.” 30 These dueling arguments revealed the key differences in environmental thought: Muir, on the side of the preservationists, advocated setting aside pristine lands for their aesthetic and spiritual value, for those who could take his advice to “[get] in touch with the nerves of Mother Earth.” 31 Pinchot, on the other hand, led the charge for conservation, a kind of environmental utilitarianism that emphasized the efficient use of available resources, through planning and control and “the prevention of waste.” 32 In Hetch Hetchy, conservation won out. Congress approved the project in 1913. The dam was built and the valley flooded for the benefit of San Francisco residents.

Pair with Daniel Mayer (photographer), May 2002.

The image on the top shows the Hetch Hetchy Valley before it was dammed. The bottom photograph, taken almost a century later, shows the obvious difference after damming, with the submergence of the valley floor under the reservoir waters. Photograph of the Hetch Hetchy Valley before damming, from the Sierra Club Bulletin, January 1908. Wikimedia ; Daniel Mayer (photographer), May 2002. Wikimedia .

While preservation was often articulated as an escape from an increasingly urbanized and industrialized way of life and as a welcome respite from the challenges of modernity (at least, for those who had the means to escape), the conservationists were more closely aligned with broader trends in American society. Although the “greatest good for the greatest number” was very nearly the catchphrase of conservation, conservationist policies most often benefited the nation’s financial interests. For example, many states instituted game laws to regulate hunting and protect wildlife, but laws could be entirely unbalanced. In Pennsylvania, local game laws included requiring firearm permits for noncitizens, barred hunting on Sundays, and banned the shooting of songbirds. These laws disproportionately affected Italian immigrants, critics said, as Italians often hunted songbirds for subsistence, worked in mines for low wages every day but Sunday, and were too poor to purchase permits or to pay the fines levied against them when game wardens caught them breaking these new laws. Other laws, for example, offered up resources to businesses at costs prohibitive to all but the wealthiest companies and individuals, or with regulatory requirements that could be met only by companies with extensive resources.

But Progressive Era environmentalism addressed more than the management of American public lands. After all, reformers addressing issues facing the urban poor were also doing environmental work. Settlement house workers like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley focused on questions of health and sanitation, while activists concerned with working conditions, most notably Dr. Alice Hamilton, investigated both worksite hazards and occupational and bodily harm. The progressives’ commitment to the provision of public services at the municipal level meant more coordination and oversight in matters of public health, waste management, and even playgrounds and city parks. Their work focused on the intersection of communities and their material environments, highlighting the urgency of urban environmental concerns.

While reform movements focused their attention on the urban poor, other efforts targeted rural communities. The Country Life movement, spearheaded by Liberty Hyde Bailey, sought to support agrarian families and encourage young people to stay in their communities and run family farms. Early-twentieth-century educational reforms included a commitment to environmentalism at the elementary level. Led by Bailey and Anna Botsford Comstock, the nature study movement took students outside to experience natural processes and to help them develop observational skills and an appreciation for the natural world.

Other examples highlight the interconnectedness of urban and rural communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The extinction of the North American passenger pigeon reveals the complexity of Progressive Era relationships between people and nature. Passenger pigeons were actively hunted, prepared at New York’s finest restaurants and in the humblest of farm kitchens. Some hunted them for pay; others shot them in competitions at sporting clubs. And then they were gone, their ubiquity giving way only to nostalgia. Many Americans took notice at the great extinction of a species that had perhaps numbered in the billions and then was eradicated. Women in Audubon Society chapters organized against the fashion of wearing feathers—even whole birds—on ladies’ hats. Upper- and middle-class women made up the lion’s share of the membership of these societies. They used their social standing to fight for birds. Pressure created national wildlife refuges and key laws and regulations that included the Lacey Act of 1900, banning the shipment of species killed illegally across state lines. Examining how women mobilized contemporary notions of womanhood in the service of protecting birds reveals a tangle of cultural and economic processes. Such examples also reveal the range of ideas, policies, and practices wrapped up in figuring out what—and who—American nature should be for.

America’s tragic racial history was not erased by the Progressive Era. In fact, in all too many ways, reform removed African Americans ever farther from American public life. In the South, electoral politics remained a parade of electoral fraud, voter intimidation, and race-baiting. Democratic Party candidates stirred southern whites into frenzies with warnings of “negro domination” and of Black men violating white women. The region’s culture of racial violence and the rise of lynching as a mass public spectacle accelerated. And as the remaining African American voters threatened the dominance of Democratic leadership in the South, southern Democrats turned to what many white southerners understood as a series of progressive electoral and social reforms—disenfranchisement and segregation. Just as reformers would clean up politics by taming city political machines, white southerners would “purify” the ballot box by restricting Black voting, and they would prevent racial strife by legislating the social separation of the races. The strongest supporters of such measures in the South were progressive Democrats and former Populists, both of whom saw in these reforms a way to eliminate the racial demagoguery that conservative Democratic party leaders had so effectively wielded. Leaders in both the North and South embraced and proclaimed the reunion of the sections on the basis of white supremacy. As the nation took up the “white man’s burden” to uplift the world’s racially inferior peoples, the North looked to the South as an example of how to manage nonwhite populations. The South had become the nation’s racial vanguard. 33

The question was how to accomplish disfranchisement. The Fifteenth Amendment clearly prohibited states from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of race. In 1890, a Mississippi state newspaper called on politicians to devise “some legal defensible substitute for the abhorrent and evil methods on which white supremacy lies.” 34 The state’s Democratic Party responded with a new state constitution designed to purge corruption at the ballot box through disenfranchisement. African Americans hoping to vote in Mississippi would have to jump through a series of hurdles designed with the explicit purpose of excluding them from political power. The state first established a poll tax, which required voters to pay for the privilege of voting. Second, it stripped suffrage from those convicted of petty crimes most common among the state’s African Americans. Next, the state required voters to pass a literacy test. Local voting officials, who were themselves part of the local party machine, were responsible for judging whether voters were able to read and understand a section of the Constitution. In order to protect illiterate whites from exclusion, the so-called “understanding clause” allowed a voter to qualify if they could adequately explain the meaning of a section that was read to them. In practice these rules were systematically abused to the point where local election officials effectively wielded the power to permit and deny suffrage at will. The disenfranchisement laws effectively moved electoral conflict from the ballot box, where public attention was greatest, to the voting registrar, where supposedly color-blind laws allowed local party officials to deny the ballot without the appearance of fraud. 35

Between 1895 and 1908, the rest of the states in the South approved new constitutions including these disenfranchisement tools. Six southern states also added a grandfather clause, which bestowed suffrage on anyone whose grandfather was eligible to vote in 1867. This ensured that whites who would have been otherwise excluded through mechanisms such as poll taxes or literacy tests would still be eligible, at least until grandfather clauses were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1915. Finally, each southern state adopted an all-white primary and excluded Black Americans from the Democratic primary, the only political contests that mattered across much of the South. 36

For all the legal double-talk, the purpose of these laws was plain. James Kimble Vardaman, later governor of Mississippi, boasted that “there is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. Mississippi’s constitutional convention was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics; not the ignorant—but the nigger.” 37 These technically color-blind tools did their work well. In 1900 Alabama had 121,159 literate Black men of voting age. Only 3,742 were registered to vote. Louisiana had 130,000 Black voters in the contentious election of 1896. Only 5,320 voted in 1900. Black people were clearly the target of these laws, but that did not prevent some whites from being disenfranchised as well. Louisiana dropped 80,000 white voters over the same period. Most politically engaged southern whites considered this a price worth paying to prevent the alleged fraud that plagued the region’s elections. 38

At the same time that the South’s Democratic leaders were adopting the tools to disenfranchise the region’s Black voters, these same legislatures were constructing a system of racial segregation even more pernicious. While it built on earlier practice, segregation was primarily a modern and urban system of enforcing racial subordination and deference. In rural areas, white and Black southerners negotiated the meaning of racial difference within the context of personal relationships of kinship and patronage. An African American who broke the local community’s racial norms could expect swift personal sanction that often included violence. The crop lien and convict lease systems were the most important legal tools of racial control in the rural South. Maintaining white supremacy there did not require segregation. Maintaining white supremacy within the city, however, was a different matter altogether. As the region’s railroad networks and cities expanded, so too did the anonymity and therefore freedom of southern Black people. Southern cities were becoming a center of Black middle-class life that was an implicit threat to racial hierarchies. White southerners created the system of segregation as a way to maintain white supremacy in restaurants, theaters, public restrooms, schools, water fountains, train cars, and hospitals. Segregation inscribed the superiority of whites and the deference of Black people into the very geography of public spaces.

As with disenfranchisement, segregation violated a plain reading of the Constitution—in this case the Fourteenth Amendment. Here the Supreme Court intervened, ruling in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) that the Fourteenth Amendment only prevented discrimination directly by states. It did not prevent discrimination by individuals, businesses, or other entities. Southern states exploited this interpretation with the first legal segregation of railroad cars in 1888. In a case that reached the Supreme Court in 1896, New Orleans resident Homer Plessy challenged the constitutionality of Louisiana’s segregation of streetcars. The court ruled against Plessy and, in the process, established the legal principle of separate but equal. Racially segregated facilities were legal provided they were equivalent. In practice this was almost never the case. The court’s majority defended its position with logic that reflected the racial assumptions of the day. “If one race be inferior to the other socially,” the court explained, “the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.” Justice John Harlan, the lone dissenter, countered, “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” Harlan went on to warn that the court’s decision would “permit the seeds of race hatred to be planted under the sanction of law.” 39 In their rush to fulfill Harlan’s prophecy, southern whites codified and enforced the segregation of public spaces.

Segregation was built on a fiction—that there could be a white South socially and culturally distinct from African Americans. Its legal basis rested on the constitutional fallacy of “separate but equal.” Southern whites erected a bulwark of white supremacy that would last for nearly sixty years. Segregation and disenfranchisement in the South rejected Black citizenship and relegated Black social and cultural life to segregated spaces. African Americans lived divided lives, acting the part whites demanded of them in public, while maintaining their own world apart from whites. This segregated world provided a measure of independence for the region’s growing Black middle class, yet at the cost of poisoning the relationship between Black and white. Segregation and disenfranchisement created entrenched structures of racism that completed the total rejection of the promises of Reconstruction.

And yet many Black Americans of the Progressive Era fought back. Just as activists such as Ida Wells worked against southern lynching, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois vied for leadership among African American activists, resulting in years of intense rivalry and debated strategies for the uplifting of Black Americans.

Born into the world of bondage in Virginia in 1856, Booker Taliaferro Washington was subjected to the degradation and exploitation of slavery early in life. But Washington also developed an insatiable thirst to learn. Working against tremendous odds, Washington matriculated into Hampton University in Virginia and thereafter established a southern institution that would educate many Black Americans, the Tuskegee Institute, located in Alabama. Washington envisioned that Tuskegee’s contribution to Black life would come through industrial education and vocational training. He believed that such skills would help African Americans accomplish economic independence while developing a sense of self-worth and pride of accomplishment, even while living within the putrid confines of Jim Crow. Washington poured his life into Tuskegee, and thereby connected with leading white philanthropic interests. Individuals such as Andrew Carnegie, for instance, financially assisted Washington and his educational ventures.

The strategies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois differed, but their desire remained the same: better lives for African Americans. Harris & Ewing, “WASHINGTON BOOKER T,” between 1905 and 1915. Library of Congress .

Washington became a leading spokesperson for Black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly after Frederick Douglass’s death in early 1895. Washington’s famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech from that same year encouraged Black Americans to “cast your bucket down” to improve life’s lot under segregation. In the same speech, delivered one year before the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision that legalized segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine, Washington said to white Americans, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” 40 Washington was both praised as a race leader and pilloried as an accommodationist to America’s unjust racial hierarchy; his public advocacy of a conciliatory posture toward white supremacy concealed the efforts to which he went to assist African Americans in the legal and economic quest for racial justice. In addition to founding Tuskegee, Washington also published a handful of influential books, including the autobiography Up from Slavery (1901). Like Du Bois, Washington was also active in Black journalism, working to fund and support Black newspaper publications, most of which sought to counter Du Bois’s growing influence. Washington died in 1915, during World War I, of ill health in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Speaking decades later, Du Bois said Washington had, in his 1895 “Compromise” speech, “implicitly abandoned all political and social rights. . . . I never thought Washington was a bad man . . . I believed him to be sincere, though wrong.” Du Bois would directly attack Washington in his classic 1903 The Souls of Black Folk , but at the turn of the century he could never escape the shadow of his longtime rival. “I admired much about him,” Du Bois admitted. “Washington . . . died in 1915. A lot of people think I died at the same time.” 41

Du Bois’s criticism reveals the politicized context of the Black freedom struggle and exposes the many positions available to Black activists. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, Du Bois entered the world as a free person of color three years after the Civil War ended. He was raised by a hardworking and independent mother; his New England childhood alerted him to the reality of race even as it invested the emerging thinker with an abiding faith in the power of education. Du Bois graduated at the top of his high school class and attended Fisk University. Du Bois’s sojourn to the South in 1880s left a distinct impression that would guide his life’s work to study what he called the “Negro problem,” the systemic racial and economic discrimination that Du Bois prophetically pronounced would be the problem of the twentieth century. After Fisk, Du Bois’s educational path trended back North. He attended Harvard, earned his second degree, crossed the Atlantic for graduate work in Germany, and circulated back to Harvard, and in 1895, he became the first Black American to receive a PhD there.

“W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois,” 1919. Library of Congress .

Du Bois became one of America’s foremost intellectual leaders on questions of social justice by producing scholarship that underscored the humanity of African Americans. Du Bois’s work as an intellectual, scholar, and college professor began during the Progressive Era, a time in American history marked by rapid social and cultural change as well as complex global political conflicts and developments. Du Bois addressed these domestic and international concerns not only in his classrooms at Wilberforce University in Ohio and Atlanta University in Georgia but also in a number of his early publications on the history of the transatlantic slave trade and Black life in urban Philadelphia. The most well-known of these early works included The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Darkwater (1920). In these books, Du Bois combined incisive historical analysis with engaging literary drama to validate Black personhood and attack the inhumanity of white supremacy, particularly in the lead-up to and during World War I. In addition to publications and teaching, Du Bois set his sights on political organizing for civil rights, first with the Niagara Movement and later with its offspring, the NAACP. Du Bois’s main work with the NAACP lasted from 1909 to 1934 as editor of The Crisis , one of America’s leading Black publications. Du Bois attacked Washington and urged Black Americans to concede to nothing, to make no compromises and advocate for equal rights under the law. Throughout his early career, he pushed for civil rights legislation, launched legal challenges against discrimination, organized protests against injustice, and applied his capacity for clear research and sharp prose to expose the racial sins of Progressive Era America.

“We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults. . . . Any discrimination based simply on race or color is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or prejudice . . . discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed. . . . Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty.” 42

W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington made a tremendous historical impact and left a notable historical legacy. They were reared under markedly different circumstances, and thus their early life experiences and even personal temperaments oriented both leaders’ lives and outlooks in decidedly different ways. Du Bois’s confrontational voice boldly targeted white supremacy. He believed in the power of social science to arrest the reach of white supremacy. Washington advocated incremental change for longer-term gain. He contended that economic self-sufficiency would pay off at a future date. Four years after Du Bois directly spoke out against Washington in the chapter “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington” in Souls of Black Folk , the two men shared the same lectern at Philadelphia Divinity School to address matters of race, history, and culture in the American South. Although their philosophies often differed, both men inspired others to demand that America live up to its democratic creed.

Industrial capitalism unleashed powerful forces in American life. Along with wealth, technological innovation, and rising standards of living, a host of social problems unsettled many who turned to reform politics to set the world right again. The Progressive Era signaled that a turning point had been reached for many Americans who were suddenly willing to confront the age’s problems with national political solutions. Reformers sought to bring order to chaos, to bring efficiency to inefficiency, and to bring justice to injustice. Causes varied, constituencies shifted, and the tangible effects of so much energy was difficult to measure, but the Progressive Era signaled a bursting of long-simmering tensions and introduced new patterns in the relationship between American society, American culture, and American politics.

1. Booker T. Washington & W.E.B. DuBois on Black Progress (1895, 1903)

Booker T. Washington, born enslaved in Virginia in 1856, founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881 and became a leading advocate of African American progress. Introduced as “a representative of Negro enterprise and Negro civilization,” Washington delivered the following remarks, sometimes called the “Atlanta Compromise” speech, at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895.

2. Jane Addams, “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” (1892)

Hull House, Chicago’s famed “settlement house,” was designed to uplift urban populations. Here, Addams explains why she believes reformers must “add the social function to democracy.” As Addams explained, Hull House “was opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal.”

3. Eugene Debs, “How I Became a Socialist” (April, 1902)

A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, Eugene V. Debs began working as a locomotive fireman (tending the fires of a train’s steam engine) as a youth in the 1870s. His experience in the American labor movement later led him to socialism. In the early-twentieth century, as the Socialist Party of America’s candidate, he ran for the presidency five times and twice earned nearly one-million votes. He was America’s most prominent socialist. In 1902, a New York paper asked Debs how he became a socialist. This is his answer.

4. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist minister and theologian, advocated for a “social gospel.” Here, he explains why he believes Christianity must address social questions.

5. Alice Stone Blackwell, Answering Objections to Women’s Suffrage (1917)

Alice Stone Blackwell was a feminist activist and writer. In an edited volume published in 1917, Blackwell responded to popular anti-women’s-suffrage arguments.

6. Woodrow Wilson on the “New Freedom,” 1912

Woodrow Wilson campaigned for the presidency in 1912 as a progressive democrat. Wilson argued that changing economic conditions demanded new and aggressive government policies–he called his political program “the New Freedom”– to preserve traditional American liberties.

7. Theodore Roosevelt on “The New Nationalism” (1910)

In 1910, a newly invigorated Theodore Roosevelt delivered his outline for a bold new progressive agenda, which he would advance in 1912 during a failed presidential run under the new Progressive, or “Bull Moose,” Party.

8. “Next!” (1904)

Illustration shows a “Standard Oil” storage tank as an octopus with many tentacles wrapped around the steel, copper, and shipping industries, as well as a state house, the U.S. Capitol, and one tentacle reaching for the White House. The only building not yet within reach of the octopus is the White House—President Teddy Roosevelt had won a reputation as a “trust buster.”

9. “College Day on the Picket Line” (1917 )

This chapter was edited by Mary Anne Henderson, with content contributions by Andrew C. Baker, Peter Catapano, Blaine Hamilton, Mary Anne Henderson, Amanda Hughett, Amy Kohout, Maria Montalvo, Brent Ruswick, Philip Luke Sinitiere, Nora Slonimsky, Whitney Stewart, and Brandy Thomas Wells.

Recommended citation: Andrew C. Baker et al., “The Progressive Era,” Mary Anne Henderson, ed., in The American Yawp , eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Causes and Effects of the Progressive Era

Essay on The Progressive Presidents

The progressiveness of the U.S. presidential elections of 1912 was concluded in different philosophies of the two prime candidates, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom expressed Progressive ideas. Although both candidates, Wilson and Roosevelt, were Progressive, their attitudes regarding the promotion and implementation of the ideas of Progressivism in the United States were different, at least in their theoretic approaches. Reviewing the complex nature of Progressivism, it is possible to explore how presidents’ policies while in office may be different from their rhetoric on the campaign trail. Actually, the study of presidency helps to better understand the nature of political philosophy (Bowles, 2011). According to third-party Bull Mooses, Americans needed a new party that would help the nation to awaken and promote the sense of justice. The Progressive Party was aimed at the fulfillment of the duty to “maintain the government of the people, by the people and for the people” (Bull Moose Party, 1912). The Bull Moose Party was linked to Roosevelt’s political ideas. Wilson and Roosevelt expressed their ideas and priorities in their speeches: New Nationalism by Roosevelt and New Freedom by Wilson. The major goal of this paper is to compare each president’s political principles with his actions while in office and define how well their actions matched their rhetoric.

Comparing Theodore Roosevelt’s political principles with his actions while in office

Theodore Roosevelt’s political principles differed from his actions while in office. Roosevelt’s political principles were aimed at developing new nationalism through socialization of democracy. He highlighted the “need for government to regulate capitalism, and provide a square deal for all Americans” (Roosevelt, 1910). Roosevelt wanted to achieve equality of opportunity, destructing the established special privileges. He said, “The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows” (Roosevelt, 1910). He wanted to achieve practical equality of opportunity for all American citizens.

Roosevelt’s presidency had been focused on realization of the new form of democracy through combining Hamilton’s strong presidency and Jefferson’s egalitarian political thought. In fact, Roosevelt was the first political leader who managed to identify national principle with reforms. He realized that American leader should not only represent the national interests, but also develop reforms to meet the needs of the nation. As a result, some of Roosevelt’s policies while in office were different from his rhetoric on the campaign trail. In general, Roosevelt became an initiator and promoter of many progressive reforms. He supported organized labor, the control and regulation of business by the government, the protection of consumer rights (Bowles, 2011).

Comparing Woodrow Wilson’s political principles with his actions while in office

Woodrow Wilson’s political principles differed from his actions while in office. Wilson Inaugural Address made in 1913 provides many important facts that reflect Wilson’s political thought. He said, “We have built up, moreover, a great system of government, which has stood through a long age as in many respects a model for those who seek to set liberty upon foundations that will endure against fortuitous change, against storm and accident” (Wilson, 1913). He wanted to improve commerce of the world based on the just principles of taxation. He planned to use the government as an instrument to promote national interests, improve banking system and industrial system. He proposed to reform political institutions, rejecting the ideas of traditional constitutionalism.

The presidency of Wilson demonstrated different outcomes. Wilson was progressive in his ideas and tried to make some changes in conditions in both the economic and political fields. He referred to historicism. Wilson acted as a reformer. He managed to lower tariffs, improve banking regulation, but failed to break up monopolies. Besides, he led the US into WWI (the Great War) in 1917, despite his peaceful intentions. He passed the Espionage Act and Sedition Act to suppress the opponents of war (Bowles, 2011).

Thus, it is necessary to conclude that both presidents succeeded in the Progressive era due to their progressive political ideas. The success of Theodore Roosevelt in politics did not influence his political contest at presidential elections of 1912. Woodrow Wilson managed to win, having the highest electoral vote and the majority of the popular vote. Nevertheless, these progressive presidents have very much in common. Both of them developed policies while in office that differed from their rhetoric on the campaign trail. Both political leaders addressed the problems caused by increased industrialization, urbanization and the growth of big businesses in their political rhetoric, but they used different approaches to solve the problem while in office. Roosevelt placed emphasis on the importance of increased efficiency brought on by big businesses, but highlighted the need to pass legislation against the abuse of power, while Wilson argued that all monopoly was unproductive and wanted to abolish it, promoting small businesses. Undoubtedly, both presidents contributed to the development of the US during the Progressive Era.

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Understanding the Progressive Era

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It can be difficult for students to understand the relevance of the period we call The Progressive Era because society before this period was very different from the society and the conditions we know today. We often assume that certain things have always been around, like laws about child labor and fire safety standards.

If you are researching this era for a project or research paper, you should begin by thinking about the way things were before government and society changed in America.

American Society Once Very Different

Before the events of the Progressive Era occurred (1890-1920), American society was much different. The federal government had less of an impact on the lives of the citizen than we know today. For example, there are laws that regulate the quality of food that is sold to American citizens, the wage that is paid to workers, and the work conditions that are endured by American workers. Before the Progressive Era food, living conditions, and employment was different.

Characteristics of the Progressive Era

Children were employed in factories
Wages were low and unregulated (with no wage minimums)
Factories were crammed and unsafe
No standards existed for food safety
No safety net existed for citizens who couldn't find employment
Housing conditions were unregulated
The environment was not protected by federal regulations

The Progressive Movement refers to social and political movements that emerged in response to rapid industrialization from which caused societal ills. As cities and factories emerged and grew, quality of life declined for many American citizens.

Many people worked to change the unjust conditions that existed as a result of the industrial growth that took place during the late 19th century. These early progressives thought that education and government intervention could ease poverty and social injustice.

Key People and Events of the Progressive Era

In 1886, the American Federation of Labor is founded by Samuel Gompers. This was one of many unions that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century in response to unfair labor practices like long hours, child labor, and dangerous working conditions.

Photojournalist Jacob Riis exposes deplorable living conditions in the slums of New York in his book How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York .

Conservation of natural resources becomes a matter of public concern, as the Sierra Club was founded in 1892 by John Muir.

Women's Suffrage gains steam when Carrie Chapman Catt becomes president of the National American Women's Suffrage Association.

Theodore Roosevelt becomes president in 1901 after the death of McKinley. Roosevelt was an advocate for "trust busting," or the breaking up of powerful monopolies that crushed competitors and controlled prices and wages.

The American Socialist Party was established in 1901.

Coal miners strike in Pennsylvania in 1902 to protest their terrible working conditions.

In 1906, Upton Sinclair publishes "The Jungle," which portrayed the deplorable conditions inside the meatpacking industry in Chicago. This led to the establishment of food and drug regulations.

In 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, which occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of a building in New York. Most of the employees were young women aged sixteen to twenty-three, and many on the ninth floor perished because exits and fire escapes were locked and blocked by the company officials. The company was acquitted of any wrongdoing, but the outrage and sympathy from this event prompted legislation concerning unsafe working conditions.

President Woodrow Wilson signs the Keating-Owens Act in 1916, which made it illegal to ship goods across state lines if they were produced by child labor .

In 1920, Congress passed the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

Research Topics for the Progressive Era

What was life like for children who worked in factories? How was this different from the work of children who lived on farms?
How did views on immigration and race change during the Progressive Era? Did the legislation of this era effect all people, or were certain populations most affected?
How do you suppose the "trust busting" legislation affected business owners? Consider exploring the events of the Progressive Era from the point of view of wealthy industrialists.
How did living conditions change for people who moved from the country to the cities during this time period? How were people better off or worse off during the shift from country living to city living?
Who were the major figures in the Women's Suffrage movement? How was life impacted for these women who came forward?
Explore and compare life in a mill village and life in a coal camp.
Why did the concern for environmental issues and natural resource preservation emerge at the same time as concern and awareness for social issues like poverty? How are these topics related?
Writers and photojournalists were key figures in Progressive Era reforms. How does their role compare to changes that have taken place due to the emergence of social media?
How has the power of the federal government changed since the Progressive Era? How have the powers of individual states changed? What about the power of the individual?
How would you compare the changes in society during the Progressive Era to changes in society during and after the Civil War?
What is meant by the term progressive? Were the changes that took place during this time period actually progressive? What does the term progressive mean in the current political climate?
The Seventeenth Amendment, which allowed for the direct election of US Senators, was ratified in 1913 during the period known as the Progressive Era. How does this reflect the sentiments of this period?
There were many setbacks to the Progressive Era movements and campaigns. Who and what created these setbacks, and what were the interests of the parties involved?
Prohibition, the constitutional ban on the production and transportation of alcoholic beverages, also took place during the Progressive Era. How and why was alcohol the subject of concern during this period? What was the impact of Prohibition, good and bad, on society?
What was the role of the Supreme Court during the Progressive Era?

The Progressive Era History Essay

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Introduction

Start of the progressive movement, the era of prohibition, works cited.

The Progressive era in the United States which lasted from 1890 to 1920 was known for two things, namely that it was a period of progressive social movement and change that sought to reform many aspects of the country such as the government and economy.

It was also known as the era of Prohibition where in their zeal to completely revolutionize all aspects of American society the Progressives, as they were known, actually caused a large percentage of the population to turn to illegal and downright criminal behavior. This divergent set of events came as a result of the various reform movements that Progressives both within and outside of the government were trying to achieve.

It must be noted that initially the Progressive movement began as a social movement within various local areas which slowly progressed towards the national level. It attempted to address issues such as poverty, racism and class warfare under the assumption that most of society’s problems could actually be “fixed” by initiating social and political reforms (Leonard, 207).

This involved providing a far reaching education system for all classes, a safe environment for communities and families through political and social reform and finally an efficient workplace where anyone who wished to work would be able to earn a decent living (Leonard, 210).

The Progressive movement actually had far reaching effects which can still be felt to this day such as setting into motion concepts related to corporate monitoring, allowing women and minorities to vote and finally combating public fears against the supposed evils of immigration. While such methods of attempted reform can be considered largely positive it was only when the Progressives attempted to tackle vices that led to the movement’s greatest mistake.

The era of Prohibition, which consisted of outlawing the sale and manufacturing of alcohol, was actually started by various religious groups who rode on the coattails of the Progressive movement stating the “social harm” that alcohol had on the general population. As a result, the ban on alcohol achieved success by 1917 resulting in a general ban on its sale and production.

Despite the ban on alcohol a significant percentage of the local population still demanded the product which as a result caused many of them to either illegally manufacture it themselves or resort to smuggling it into the U.S (Beshears, 198). Millions of dollars were spent on preventing alcohol from reaching U.S. borders which further encouraged people to smuggle even more into the country due to the high prices they commanded.

In fact the era of Prohibition actually caused more alcohol to be consumed as compared to when the ban was not in place (Beshears, 200). As a result of the overzealousness of the Progressives a large percentage of the American population could actually be consider criminals which is more or less a slap in the face for a movement that tried to establish social and political reform.

Based on the facts presented in this paper it can be said that the Progressive movement was both positive and negative. Positive in that it was able to establish sufficient social, economic and political reform ideas that are apparent even today but it can also be considered negative since as a result of its overzealousness in “reforming” society it actually caused a period in American history characterized by a large percentage of the population turning to illegal actions.

Beshears, Laura. “Honorable Style in Dishonorable Times American Gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s.” Journal of American Culture 33.3 (2010): 197-206. EBSCO. Web.

Leonard, Thomas C. “Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19.4 (2005): 207-224. EBSCO. Web.

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American History,

Progressive Era

Role of Presidents Through Progressive Era

As John D. Rockefeller said, ‘The day of the combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return.” During the 1890-1920 era it had been called the Progressive Era. The Progressive Era is a period of overspread of social activism and political reform across the United States. Many problems had been going on during this era such as industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and corruption in government. Throughout the Progressive Era Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson had played a huge role throughout the era they were the main progressive U.S. Presidents. Social and political change in American society was serious to all involved. Teddy Roosevelt had been politically famous as the first president of the Progressive Era “The Progressive Movement covered social reform issues relating to female suffrage, education, working conditions, unionization, the problems of urbanization, industrialization and child labor.”(Alchin).

President Teddy Roosevelt had dealt with preparing America for the worst. Teddy Roosevelt had wanted to make the country’s defenses strong. One big accomplish he had done was making the U.S. Navy a major international force at sea. The poor have had to deal with some of the worst circumstances out there. He had fought for their conditions to be better. It was the same for the blacks they did not have any equality. Teddy Roosevelt and another president Woodrow Wilson had practically created the, “anglo-saxon race” which was for those who had been poor and blacks. Progressives had waged war against corporate behavior. They had also tried getting rid of brutal conditions that had been in the factory industry. Usually Congress is the bicameral legislature of the Federal government of the United States which is higher than presidency in certain cases. While Teddy Roosevelt was in office he gained more than Congress.

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The second president along the Progressive Era, William Howard Taft, he had been different but in reality they had both succeeded. While Teddy Roosevelt believed that the presidents could use their power the best, Taft, supported the“strict” interpretation of the Constitution. The whole part of having private property was a good idea. The third president, Woodrow Wilson, an advocate on how the national bank achieved financial stability from emergency in the futures. Woodrow Wilson truly only became president because of Roosevelt. Roosevelt had because he had been so annoyed by the second president, William Howard Taft, because he did not support the progressive causes. So he ran for a third party candidate, but he had been racist.

The Reconstruction had ultimately failed, why?… It is crazy that the progressive era had started as a “social movement”, “World War I when the horrors of war exposed people’s cruelty and many. The Compromise of 1876 dramatically ended the Reconstruction era. The people in down south had a different look on everything so the democrat southerners had wanted to protect civil and political rights of blacks were not kept. Reconstruction ultimately failed when the Compromise of 1877, had been an unwritten deal that determined the long challenging presidential election. The United States federal government had pulled the last troops they had out of the South, and formally ended the Reconstruction Era.

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Progressive era to new era, 1900-1929.

As President Joe Biden steps aside, is America ready for President Kamala Harris?

Kamala Harris has been on a yo-yo string with Democratic Party bigwigs since that cataclysmic debate performance catapulted her boss out of a sure 2024 nomination.

Weeks before President Joe Biden stepped aside – and swiftly endorsed Harris to be the 2024 nominee – the vice president had emerged as the most logical replacement to top the ticket after Biden wore his frailty on national TV.

Allies disseminated a logic about why Harris would be the natural successor: She could seamlessly inherit the campaign's massive warchest; her law enforcement background is best suited to prosecute the political case against Republican Donald Trump; polling shows she can win ; and having been the nation's first multiracial and woman VP could galvanize a new generation of younger progressives.

But from the start, there has been a hesitancy to fully embrace the country’s second-in-command, with some Democrats openly overlooking her. When a group of 24 former House Democrats sent Biden a letter last week lobbying for an open convention in August, it made no mention of Harris.

The day after Biden found himself fighting for his future in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Harris was asked to assure Black women, the party’s backbone , that the U.S. wouldn’t take a step backward in this election on issues they care about, including economic and reproductive freedom. Her message was far from reassuring.

“Here’s the thing about elections,” Harris told a moderator at Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans on July 6, during a discussion entitled “Chief to Chief.” “The people who make decisions at that level often will pay attention to either who’s writing the checks or who votes. That’s a cold, hard reality.”

Recent history: Kamala Harris on standby as Democrats plunge into panic mode

The 59-year-old Harris may seem the obvious strategic page turn for the party as well as a generational shift. Her life has been an acrobatic twist and turn, filled with personal challenges and accomplishments, including political tests in her home state of California similar to what she and the country face now.

But some wonder whether a country bitterly divided by cultural issues around race, gender and family – already seemingly poised to return Donald Trump to power – is ready for a woman of color to sit in the Oval Office.

“Black women are judged more harshly by the right, by the left – by everyone,” said Aimy Steele, founder and CEO of The New North Carolina Project, which is dedicated to expanding voter engagement and access in the Tar Heel State.

Steele said beyond race and gender, there are other parts of Harris’ life that she believes liberal allies will fail to accept or defend, including that she is a professional woman who went unmarried most of her life and put her career first without having biological children.

“I think we’re kidding ourselves to really believe that we are, even on the progressive side, in a post-racial democracy or a place where these types of things don’t matter,” said Steele, who unsuccessfully ran for the North Carolina legislature in 2020.

Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told USA TODAY that’s “all the more reason to make sure that we stand with her. We need to stand for something.”

“Misogyny, racism and other forms of bigotry are going to exist in this country, and yes, they may even be exacerbated by having a woman of color at the top of the ticket,” said Soifer, who served as a national security adviser to Harris in the Senate.

“But that is absolutely not a reason to cower or to allow the fear of that hate to impede progress in this country, and that’s actually been driving Kamala Harris her whole career.”

Other progressives still bruised by the political backlashes from the Barack Obama years emphasize that they concur: Harris is the face of the country’s future. The U.S. is projected to be majority people of color by 2045.

Trump and other Republicans have long been aware of the possible ticket switch, and have derided Harris as incompetent , socially awkward and responsible for chief failures in the Biden administration. GOP officials suggest that’s only the beginning.

“We’ve not really gone into depths with the record of Kamala Harris,” Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., said in a Fox News Sunday appearance this month.

At the Republican National Convention last week, former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley reminded delegates she had predicted Democrats would look to pass the baton to Harris in the middle of the 2024 contest.

“For more than a year, I said a vote for Joe Biden is a vote for President Kamala Harris,” she said. "After seeing the debate, everyone knows it’s true. If we have four more years of Biden or a single day of Harris, our country will be badly worse off."

Dems not fully sold on Harris either

Harris’ opposition is not only coming from the other side of the aisle, as Democratic skeptics worry about her viability.

A former Harris staffer wrote in The Atlantic this month “an automatic coronation of Harris would be a grave mistake.” She argued for a process to battle-test her against others vs. Trump; and said supporters are too quick to write off viability concerns as “racist and sexist.”

A new AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey released this past week found 58% of Democrats believe Harris would make a good president. But the poll shows 22% of Democrats don't think she would versus 20% who said they don’t know enough about her.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., warned in a Instagram live Thursday it would be incorrect to think there is a consensus among Democrats that Harris will get the support of people who wanted Biden to leave.

Those individuals, she said, “are interested in removing the whole ticket.”

Other progressives, however, warn that backing away from Harris could be disastrous for the party. Democratic strategist Bakari Sellers summed it up in a post on X: “ Skip over Kamala Harris at your own peril.”

A child of immigrants with a fierce, ‘extraordinary’ mother

Harris was born in Oakland, Calif. in 1964 amid the Civil Rights Movement to immigrant parents – her father Donald Harris, was an economist born in Jamaica and Shyamala Gopalan, was a cancer researcher from India.

In her 2019 memoir, she briefly describes her parents’ marriage falling apart when she was five, leading to divorce. She only saw her father during summers in Palo Alto when he taught at Stanford, and acknowledges she was shaped by her 5’1” mother, whom she calls “extraordinary.”

Her mother took a teaching job at McGill University when Harris was 12, moving her and her sister to Montreal from 1976 until she graduated from high school in 1981.

It was in Canada where Harris first developed an affinity for lawyers who broke barriers such as Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, Constance Baker Motley – giants of the civil rights movement, she wrote.

Harris returned to the states to attend Howard University where she flourished in the environment where “everyone was young, gifted and Black.” She pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., the second founded of the historic “divine nine” Greek-lettered organizations among African Americans. She interned at the Federal Trade Commission; researched at the National Archives and was a tour guide at the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

She first entered politics as a staffer for Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston, of California, and then returned home to Oakland to U.C. Hastings College of Law and graduated in 1989.

Harris revealed in her book she took the California bar exam that July and “to my utter devastation, I had failed,” an acknowledged setback for a self-described perfectionist. She passed in February 1990 and began work at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.

Her political star began to rise in 1994 with her relationship with Willie Brown, the legendary California politician who at the time was the statehouse speaker, married – although long separated – and 30 years older than Harris.

California entrepreneur Trevor Traina, a longtime Harris friend and former U.S. ambassador to Austria, said that relationship was a politically formative one.

"Kamala’s a warm person who has a lot of charm and charisma. And she is the protégé of Willie Brown, who is the king of charm,” Traina said in an interview with USA TODAY. “And I think she learned well from him.”

Influential San Francisco Chronicle gossip columnist Herb Caen first put her name in print that March as Brown and Harris were spotted around town.

Their romance continued to raise eyebrows that November when Brown named Harris to a state medical board, along with a hefty salary. The affair ended in 1996, but the pair would be linked for decades and the subject of character assaults into the 2020 campaign.

Kristin Powell, principal of Black to the Future Action Fund, a national political advocacy group, said women in politics typically have their dating and sex lives dragged out in public as disqualifiers for higher office.

“The threats against her, in my opinion, will be astronomically higher than the ones against Obama because she’s a woman, not just a Black person, but a Black woman,” she said.

Powell said that same standard isn’t applied to men, noting that for years Trump has been accused of having extra-martial affairs and of sexual assault (which the former president vehemently denies).

By 2000, Harris moved to City Hall and quickly set her eyes on the city’s top prosecutor job, challenging incumbent Terence Hallinan in 2003. An archived radio debate from that election previewed the sharp-elbowed Harris in her first political battle focused on a backlog of 40 homicide cases.

“We are seeing an erosion of the criminal justice system, an absolute neglect of cases and they’re prioritizing politics over professionalism,” Harris said in the testy segment.

Harris’ campaign sent out mailers featuring the ten faces of previous San Francisco DAs stretching back to 1900. All male, all white. “It’s time for a change,” it read in block red letters.

She has continued to underscore the importance of U.S. leadership looking like the increasingly diverse country, including earlier this month at the Essence Festival of Culture, an annual mecca for Black women.

“Let us always celebrate the diversity, the depth and the beauty of our culture,” she said.

If the vice president were to become the first name on a Democratic ticket, political activists such as Powell believe it would be a game-changer in 2024.

“There would be a lot of excitement, not just for her, but when a Black woman gets to the White House, her or someone else, it will be a lot of excitement for women in this country because we deserve to have female leadership,” she said.

Yet, recent polling shows Harris doesn’t necessarily outpace Biden in terms of Black voter enthusiasm, which may indicate she is in a weaker position than some supporters assume.

More: Biden's support among Black women leaders still strong even as others jump ship

Quentin James, founder and president of Collective PAC, which is aimed at building Black political power, said the vice president’s identity is a chief engine of her popularity with racially diverse constituents, but that more sophisticated minority voters have a sharper grading curve.

“I definitely think that representation alone is not enough,” he said. “People are looking for the meat and substance, and not solely the identity.”

Powell concurs that excitement over a non-white, non-male candidate comes second to certain policy commitments, especially among those who’ve lived through the Obama era.

“We would applaud having a Black woman in the White House,” Powell said. “But before we get excited about whether that's Kamala Harris, we need to understand what she’s going to give us.”

Harris was California’s top cop

A decade before being elevated to the vice presidency, Harris demonstrated an uncanny ability to beat the political odds in a political landscape that, much like today’s national terrain, was dominated by aging white men.

Traina said more than any other time period, he believes Harris’ time as San Francisco’s district attorney is an instructive window into her leadership. He said the city is cosmopolitan and international, but also notoriously left-leaning ranging from mainstream Democrats to socialists.

“There's a tension between the center left and the far left, which I think mirrors the national scene right now for the Democratic Party,” Traina said. “And you have politicians who need to be elected and who need to be able to speak to the center, who understand how to navigate that environment, and Kamala is one of those people.”

She took aim at the California Attorney General’s office in 2010 after the incumbent, Democrat Jerry Brown, ran for governor to replace term-limited Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was up to Harris to retain the seat for the Democrats, and that election season was an extraordinary one as well. It would become the nationwide sweep known as the “red wave.”

Political attacks on Harris included her decision as San Francisco DA to not seek the death penalty for a gang member who shot and killed a police officer.

On Election Day in 2010, the red wave broke. Republicans regained control of the U.S. House and reclaimed governor’s seats and statehouses nationwide. In the Harris-Cooley race, however, the vote turned out to be one of the closest in California history. Ballot counting took more than three weeks.

Ace Smith, Harris’ political consultant at the time, recalls how the San Francisco Chronicle initially declared Cooley the victor.

It was a “Dewey defeats Truman” moment. In the end, Cooley had to concede.

Author Dan Morain, a Harris biographer, points to the win as a formative episode, where national politicians took notice of the upstart from California. The red wave, he said, “stopped at the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada.”

Smith called Harris a “supremely talented, charismatic person” who attracted voters despite being outspent. In an oral history with Capitol Weekly last year, he suggested the race turned on a debate stage where Cooley defended taking both a pension and a salary after retiring.

Harris’ tenure as California attorney general drew accolades from Obama, who cast her as a “brilliant” and “dedicated” campaigner.

“(S)he is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake," Obama said at a 2013 fundraiser that is best remembered for the president’s commentary on her attractiveness. (He quickly apologized.)

After becoming attorney general, it was clear to many observers Harris was aiming for even higher office, taking cautious positions on hot-button issues – or no position at all.

That would become the basis of Morain’s book, “ Kamala’s Way ,” about her ascent to the U.S. Senate and ultimately the vice presidency.

“It’s about her way of operating, and it’s her path to getting to where she is,” Morain said. “She can be very tough, she can be empathetic, she can be cautious, she can be unsure of herself, but she’s very smart and quick on her feet.”

It’s in this period that a friend introduced Harris to an entertainment lawyer in L.A. who would become her husband. Doug Emhoff would become the first second gentleman and first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president. After they wed in 2014, Emhoff’s children Cole and Ella didn’t want to call Harris a stepmom and coined the phrase: “Momala.”

By January 2015 a new lane had opened. Longtime Sen. Barbara Boxer announced she would not seek reelection in 2016. That left two of Smith’s clients, Harris and then-California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, to hash out their political futures – which Smith has said was less dramatic than some have reported.

“That’s stuff of legends and myths, but not true,” Smith said in 2023 . “And at the end of the day, (Newsom) wanted to be governor more than he wanted to be senator. She wanted to be senator… The good news was it was folks who knew each other well.”

In California’s primary system, where the top two vote-getters advance, Harris emerged as the winner to run against fellow Democrat Loretta Sanchez, an almost 10-year veteran of the House of Representatives. She sailed to a more than 20-point victory over Sanchez in the general election in 2016, with the support of Obama and his vice president – Joe Biden.

A combative prosecutor on Capitol Hill

Harris became only the second Black woman to serve in the Senate in history following Illinois’s Carol Moseley Braun, a victory that came amid a new kind of red wave: That same night, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.

Harris arrived at the Senate primed for the conflict. Her maiden speech on the Senate floor laced into Trump’s nominee for education secretary and future Cabinet member Betsy DeVos.

She landed initial appointments to the Homeland Security and Intelligence committees, in addition to the Environment and Budget panels. A year into office , Harris’ legal background helped her secure a spot on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which gave her a platform to grill Trump’s judicial nominees.

She leaned into questions about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and pressed future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on abortion rights.

“Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” she asked Kavanaugh during the exchange.

Kavanaugh replied, “I’m not thinking of any right now, senator.”

The clip went viral.

Soifer, the former national security adviser, said those examples in the Senate underscore how Harris is uniquely positioned to be the Democratic nominee. Harris would be the most stark contrast with Trump at a time when women’s rights, particularly reproductive healthcare, is at the forefront.

“She’s a force to be reckoned with, and I would love to see her debate Donald Trump,” Soifer said. “She would eviscerate him.”

Several months after the Kavanaugh hearings, Harris announced she’d run for president. She had served in the Senate just two years. She had not yet written a single piece of legislation that became law.

But she also had never lost an election.

Sizzling debate performance, then presidential hopes implode

Naysayers are quick to point at Harris’ failed 2020 presidential bid, which closed up shop before the first ballots were even cast.

Harris declared in her birthplace of Oakland, near the hospital where she was born; the University of California, Berkeley, where her parents met; and a stone’s throw from where she had worked as a young district attorney.

She was running to protect America’s democratic institutions and healthcare access for all, she said, to check the white supremacists who descended on Charlottesville and to keep children out of cages at the southern border.

“People in power are trying to convince us that the villain in our American story is each other. But that is not our story. That is not who we are. That’s not our America,” she said as she stood in front of Oakland City Hall.

Harris caught the country’s attention when she went after Biden at the first Democratic debate that summer. She criticized the former vice president for comments he’d made about pro-segregationists he served with and shared with him what it was like to be bused to an all-white school.

“You also worked with them to oppose busing,” she said. “And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

Harris shot up in the rankings: she was in a tight race for second place.

But the momentum did not hold. Less than three months after the breakout moment, Harris’ campaign was sinking. She was down in the polls, and running out of cash. She’d burned through a $35 million war chest and her campaign was rife with infighting .

Harris made one of the most difficult decisions of her political career. With two months to go until the Iowa Caucus, she quit the race.

Smith, the political consultant who engineered Harris’ 2010 win in the face of the red wave, said bowing out of the presidential race in 2020 was the right call and led to her vice presidential nod, contrasted with Elizabeth Warren’s bid that dragged on.

“Sometimes,” Smith said in 2023, “the wisest political decision you can make is actually to realize when you're not being successful and get out.”

The calculus paid off: When Biden secured the nomination, thanks largely to African American voters, he chose her as his running mate.

Harris’ sharp debate skills served her well on Biden’s ticket. As then-Vice President Mike Pence tried to interrupt her, Harris delivered one of the most memorable lines of her political career that turned into an online sensation.

“Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking,” she told Pence.

“She’s a remarkable leader who inspires certainly all of those who have worked with her closely, but also now the American people, especially women and young women who look to her as someone who gives them a sense of empowerment,” Soifer said. “She’s a fighter.”

Some wonder: What has Kamala Harris done as vice president?

Harris' election to vice president as the first woman, Black person and Asian American to serve in the role was met with celebration.

That enthusiasm waned over the years as Harris fumbled early assignments, which supporters claim she was unfairly saddled with in the early days of the Biden administration.

The president tasked her with addressing the “root causes” of mass migration to the southern border – an area she had little to no expertise on as a senator or attorney general. Harris’ team had to bring in outside experts from nonprofit organizations that do work in the region to brief her.

On a trip to Guatemala that June, Harris came under heavy scrutiny for telling NBC’s Lester Holt she’d been to the U.S.-Mexico border. Neither she nor Biden had at that point. The White House stressed that was not her assignment – it was to work with Northern Triangle countries. Harris soon caved to political pressure. Within weeks, she visited El Paso, Texas , where she scolded Congress to “stop the rhetoric and the finger pointing” and pass immigration legislation.

The pandemic and the efforts the White House took to protect the president and vice president from getting COVID left Harris isolated and unable to travel frequently her first year in office. The problem was compounded as Biden and his advisers struggled with how to utilize her.

Those episodes were brought up regularly during the GOP convention in Milwaukee last week as Republicans prepared for a scenario in which Harris could be the Democratic candidate.

“When Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refused to even come to Texas and see the border crisis that they created, I took the border crisis to them,” Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said on the convention stage.

Other Republicans, such as Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., accused the VP of enabling “criminals and rioters” during the protests following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

Biden had served in the Senate for more than three decades before he became vice president. There was no existing schema for someone like Harris. She was a trained lawyer, who did a short stint as a senator.

“Most of that stuff is not transferable to the job of the vice president,” said Harris’ first communications director as vice president, Ashley Etienne. “So she figured out what are her strengths. And she’s over indexed on them.”

Harris finds her footing on reproductive rights, other liberal causes

It took the leak of a Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade for Harris to cut her own path . She’d worked closely with abortion rights advocates in California. She was in her element.

In a fiery speech the next day at an abortion rights gala , Harris reminded activists of her exchange with Kavanaugh.

“Those who attack Roe have been clear. They want to ban abortion in every state. They want to bully anyone who seeks or provides reproductive healthcare. And they want to criminalize and punish women for making these decisions,” she said.

Jason Williams, a professor of justice studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey, said Harris’ stepped-up presence in the wake of the Dobbs decision changed the perception of her role.

“That’s when we’ve seen in a very public way the power that she brings to this team,’’ Williams said. “Obviously when she's talking about anything in the judicial system that’s her own thing. That’s what she went to school for. That’s what she has worked (for) as… a prosecutor for so many years.”

Harris traveled the country, sounding the alarm. Democrats lost the House in the midterm elections but kept the Senate with her assistance.

The election-year victories finally offered Harris an issue area she could own. She reoriented her agenda around cultural issues such as gun rights and book bans. Her team launched a tightly controlled national college tour that was designed to amplify her message. Celebrity moderators appeared on stage with Harris as the VP fielded pre-approved questions.

Biden tapped her for bigger and better opportunities to represent the U.S. at overseas summits.

After Hamas launched a brutal, surprise attack against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, Harris sat in on Biden’s calls with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden then sent Harris to Dubai to discuss the governance of Gaza after the war with Middle Eastern leaders.

There she delivered a searing statement about how Israel was conducting itself in the war.

“The United States is unequivocal: International humanitarian law must be respected,” Harris said. “Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating.”

In March, she called for an immediate cease fire – remarks that were among the most pointed at that time from a member of the Biden administration.

'Already on the job:' VP role gives Harris an edge

The balance Harris would have to achieve as a presidential candidate is differentiating herself on these issues, while also taking credit for some of the administration’s accomplishments, such as student debt forgiveness and job creation.

She will have to sell herself – quickly.

“This would be the challenge: Can she communicate how much of a role she played in those kinds of outcomes?’’ said Ange-Marie Hancock, executive director of the Kirwan Institute at The Ohio State University and curator of the Kamala Harris Project, a consortium of scholars from the country studying the vice president.

Elaine Kamarck, a longtime Democratic National Committee member and expert on the party’s rules, told a group of Democratic activists during a Friday call that Harris has two major advantages: she’s already been vetted and she’s already on the job.

“We’re not going to, likely, have some surprise,” Kamarck said on the call organized by the group Delegates are Democracy . “None of the other candidates, great as they are – and some of them, I like very much, I might even like them more than the vice president – none of them have been vetted on a national stage.”

As a former prosecutor, many believe Harris also would not be intimidated by Trump, which could come with its own backlash.

“As a woman and as a woman of color, how aggressive can she be before people start having the reaction that she’s too aggressive,’’ said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. “Is that trope of the angry Black woman going to be thrown at her?”

While racist and sexist attacks aren’t new, Walsh is among those who expect them to ratchet up if Harris runs for president, alongside persistent questioning about ability and qualifications.

“It’s not going to be a walk in the park,’’ Walsh said. “We are not post-racism. We are not post-sexism. We’re still there.”

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Progressive Era reformers sought to harness the power of the federal government to eliminate unethical and unfair business practices, reduce corruption, and counteract the negative social effects of industrialization. During the Progressive Era, protections for workers and consumers were strengthened, and women finally achieved the right to vote.
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Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era | The name Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt conjures up many images: from hunter to teddy bear, from trust-buster to champion of capitalism, from Republican president to Bull Moose challenger. TR remains controversial, contradictory, and above all, larger than life. His larger-than-life image was matched by his actual life as he took on the roles of ...
Progressive Era
The Progressive Era (1901-1929) was a period in the United States during the early 20th century of widespread social activism and political reform across the country. [1] [2] Progressives sought to address the problems caused by rapid industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and political corruption as well as the enormous concentration ...
Essay: The Progressive Era
Essay: The Progressive Era. The Civil War increased the power of the federal government by forcing the Southern states to abolish slavery and paved the way for still greater increase in other matters after the war. People expected it to do more, and gave it more power so it could try.
Progressive Era Politics
Progressive Era Politics. "It would be an irony of fate, if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.". Wilson's Presidency both overlapped with and was in many ways definitive of the politics of the Progressive Era (approx. 1890-1920). The term "Progressive" was broadly defined, encompassing a wide array of policies ...
20. The Progressive Era
Causes varied, constituencies shifted, and the tangible effects of so much energy was difficult to measure, but the Progressive Era signaled a bursting of long-simmering tensions and introduced new patterns in the relationship between American society, American culture, and American politics. VIII. Primary Sources. 1.
The Progressive Era
The Progressive Era started a reform tradition that has since been present in American society. Monopolies were broken up due to violation of federal law. Many labor unions, trade groups, and professional, civic, and religious associations were founded. They improved the lives of individuals and communities. Regulations that progressive groups ...
Progressive Era to New Era, 1900-1929
Next Section Automobiles in the Progressive and New Eras; Overview. The early 20th century was an era of business expansion and progressive reform in the United States. The progressives, as they called themselves, worked to make American society a better and safer place in which to live.
Essay on The Progressive Presidents
Essay on The Progressive Presidents. ... Thus, it is necessary to conclude that both presidents succeeded in the Progressive era due to their progressive political ideas. The success of Theodore Roosevelt in politics did not influence his political contest at presidential elections of 1912. Woodrow Wilson managed to win, having the highest ...
PDF 2019 APUSH DBQ Sample Responses Political Reform in the Progressive Era
Political Reform in the Progressive Era The 2019 APUSH DBQ about the success political reform during the Progressive Era can be accessed here. Five sample essays are included in this collection: SAMPLE RESPONSE A Exemplar SCORE: 7 This is the essay that I wrote in response to the prompt. I completed it in less than one hour.
Understanding the Progressive Era
Characteristics of the Progressive Era. The Progressive Movement refers to social and political movements that emerged in response to rapid industrialization from which caused societal ills. As cities and factories emerged and grew, quality of life declined for many American citizens.
How Did Jane Adddams Established The Framework For Our...
The Progressive Era established the framework for our current standards of social welfare, reflecting a shared commitment to fostering positive change and improving the lives of ordinary citizens. Jane Addams, Francis Willard and Margaret Sanger leveraged their leadership, in order to create platforms and resources for their advocacy.
The Progressive Era History
Introduction. The Progressive era in the United States which lasted from 1890 to 1920 was known for two things, namely that it was a period of progressive social movement and change that sought to reform many aspects of the country such as the government and economy. Get a custom essay on The Progressive Era History. 182 writers online.
⇉Role of Presidents Through Progressive Era Essay Example
Role of Presidents Through Progressive Era. As John D. Rockefeller said, 'The day of the combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return.". During the 1890-1920 era it had been called the Progressive Era. The Progressive Era is a period of overspread of social activism and political reform across the United States.
Progressive Era to New Era, 1900-1929
Cities During the Progressive Era In the early 1900s, the United States entered a period of peace, prosperity, and progress. In the nation's growing cities, factory output grew, small businesses flourished, and incomes rose.
What is a thesis statement about the Progressive Era?
Expert Answers. The Progressive Era (1890-1920) brought about unprecedented change in the economic, political, and social lives of Americans. These changes were needed because of the rapid ...
Progressive Presidents Essays
Essay on Progressive Presidents Essays Progressive Presidents Essays These Presidents had similar and different political views and elements. They all wanted to expand American influence, but ... Progressive Era Through the Great Depression Tynisha Miller Assignment 2: History 105 Professor Tonya Simmons November 11, 2012 Identify at least two ...
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AP U.S. History Notes

Roosevelt’s Square Deal

Taft’s Administration

Wilson’s New Freedom

How to cite this note (MLA)

Progressive Presidents: Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson

Theodore Roosevelt: The Trustbuster

William Howard Taft: The Era of Dollar Diplomacy

Woodrow Wilson: The Progressive Reformer

Comparing the Progressive Presidents

Legacy of the Progressive Presidents

Class Notes – Theodore Roosevelt – Progressive President

Theodore Roosevelt: Impact and Legacy

Sidney Milkis

More Resources

The Progressive Presidents: Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson

Roosevelt’s Square Deal

Taft’s Administration

Wilson’s New Freedom

Article contents

Social Justice Progressivism

Legal Precedent or Social Realism

Role of the State to Protect and Foster

New Practices of Democracy

Political Progressivism

Mechanisms and Processes of Electoral Democracy

Good Government by Experts

Social Science Expertise

Economic Progressivism

Antimonopoly Progressivism

Presidential Progressivism

Trade Union Progressivism

Municipal Ownership

International Progressivism

Securing Economic Progress

Mission of Civilization

Democracy and International Cooperation

Racialized Progressivism

African American Progressivism

Immigration Restriction

100-percent Americanism

Progressivism beyond the Progressive Era

Discussion of the Literature

Primary Sources

Links to Digital Materials

The History Place

Library of Congress

University of Illinois Chicago, Special Collections

Harvard University Library Open Collections Program

Further Reading

Related Articles

Course: US history > Unit 7

The Progressive Era

The problems of industrialization

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Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era

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Timeline: The Era of Theodore Roosevelt

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The Progressive Era

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THE AMERICAN YAWP

I. Introduction

Causes and Effects of the Progressive Era

Essay on The Progressive Presidents

Understanding the Progressive Era

American Society Once Very Different

Characteristics of the Progressive Era

Key People and Events of the Progressive Era

Research Topics for the Progressive Era

Further Reading

The Progressive Era History Essay

Introduction

Sample details

Related Topics

Role of Presidents Through Progressive Era

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